In this week’s Our Take: IKEA leans into fantasy, luxury goes DIY, history becomes gameplay, fans shape football culture.
From Flat-Pack to Fantasy
Roll initiative. The party enters a flat-pack dungeon and stumbles upon Drönjöns & Dragan, IKEA’s latest side quest.
Anyone who’s ever played Dungeons & Dragons knows the hardest part isn’t slaying dragons – it’s coming up with cool names. The IKEA catalogue has a long-standing, unofficial spellbook for gamers stuck for character, place or artefact names. Drönjöns? A handy workspace accessory… or a cursed relic. Dragan? A bamboo bathroom set – or the name of your next big villain.
IKEA Italy and Ogilvy clocked this very real, Reddit-born behaviour and rolled into a gamer focused campaign. With 72% of gamers distrust traditional advertising, IKEA didn’t want to interrupt this niche community, they wanted to validate something the community already does. Gamers were invited to co-create characters, guided by a game master, with IKEA acting less like a brand and more like a generous DM.
We love how a lifestyle brand can target a niche community whilst not shrinking the audience. No interruptive ads. No cringe mechanics. Just shared world-building that respected the culture and made it legible to outsiders too. When brands treat communities like collaborators rather than targets, belonging tends to roll highest on the dice.
DIY Luxury: When YSL Makeup Becomes a Fashion Statement
A new micro-trend gaining traction on social media sees beauty fans repurposing the metal YSL logos from makeup compacts and transforming them into brooches worn on coats, knits and blazers. What started as a niche DIY experiment has quickly grown legs and has become a styling signal, blending luxury branding with handmade creativity.
This trend taps into a few things happening at once. Brooches and pins are back in fashion, the rise of upcycling as an aesthetic choice rather than a sustainability statement, and the growing appetite for personalisation. Instead of buying into luxury in the traditional sense, people are adapting it, taking recognisable designer branding and giving it a second life in a way that feels personal and creative.
From a marketing point of view, it’s an interesting signal. It shows how audiences no longer see brands as fixed or untouchable. Logos are being treated as design elements that can be reused, remixed and restyled to suit the individual. Importantly, this isn’t a rejection of luxury. The aspiration is still there, but it’s expressed in a more playful, accessible way.
Our take? Trends like this show that relevance today comes from flexibility. Brands that leave room for reinterpretation are the ones that end up being worn, shared and talked about, often in ways they never planned.
Irish Trauma Gets Gamified
The Americans are at it again. There’s a new board game on Kickstarter that’s stirring the cockels of our Irish hearts. ‘The Great Hunger’ from Compass Games, is turning one of Ireland’s darkest chapters into a card-driven experience: the 19th-century potato blight, famine, mass death and emigration.
Two to five players grow populations across Ireland, manage resources, and try to survive. And then the blight hits. Crops fail. Hunger spreads. Families emigrate or perish. The stakes are central to the game.
Part of what’s driving interest is a broader shift in how we tell stories. Board games aren’t just about fantasy worlds or dungeon crawls anymore. They’re exploring politics, disasters, inequality, these are real-world systems made tangible through play. ‘The Great Hunger’ is in that vein, using the mechanics of survival and movement to make history feel immediate. But the read the room lads.
But there’s a blatant complication, this is a game about the Irish Famine, made in the US. That fact alone raises questions about distance, memory, and who gets to turn suffering into content. For many Irish people An Gorta Mór is still alive in family histories and cultural memory. When it’s interpreted abroad, through turn-based mechanics and cards, it inevitably sparks the question. Education or exploitation?
And that tension is part of the conversation. This isn’t a game you would pull out for light, fun family game night. It’s heavy, awkward, and loaded with context. It asks players to reckon with fragility, how quickly abundance can vanish, how forces beyond any individual’s control shape survival.
Whether ‘The Great Hunger’ lands as a thoughtful historical tool or a misjudged experiment, we agree it’s already succeeded in one respect: sparking discussion. About memory, power, authorship and most importantly the ethics of who gets to tell stories about suffering. Thank you, Compass Games, for reminding us that play is never truly neutral, but The Famine is not glam. This is for sure a step too far in the states romanticism of the Irish culture and history..
Tifo Or Not To Tifo
After moving to the clubs flagship stadium, Arsenal Women’s team leads the way when it comes to bums on seats for matches with an average of over 30,000 this season when the rest of the league is averaging just under 7,000.
But the club that has often led the way in English women’s football isn’t satisfied with just attendance, they are now looking to champion Arsenal Women’s culture and match day experience befitting the quality on the pitch and the passion in the stands.
It’s new initiative, Block by Block, is working directly with supporters to reimagine what matchdays look like for the women’s team.
But this isn’t about creating that culture.
It’s about giving back to the culture that’s there and has grown over the past 40 years along with the team, by working directly with supporters to create a vibe around the stadium inkeeping with the fan culture. So far we’ve seen a 40 metre long tifo, hand stiched by Arsenal fans and a permanent mural celebrating iconic Arsenal Women’s players and fans. Arsenal Women know fans are the bedrock for success at a football club and are giving them an appropriately large stick to bang their drum with!