Jeremy Penn, Senior Creative Director & Brand Strategist

An idea isn't finished when it's conceived.

It's finished when it becomes felt.

The distance between those two momentsis the work.

Trusted By

Saks Fifth Avenue, luxury retail creative direction by Jeremy Penn

Selected Works

Lululemon

Transformed Lululemon’s ethos into experience.

Saks Fifth Avenue

Turned a legacy brand into a cultural institution.

Ed Hardy

Restored the brand’s rebellious DNA as elevated apparel.

Good Luck Dry Cleaners

Built the lifestyle brand Forbes called “The next Supreme.”

Degen Arcade

Built a patent-pending gamification engine for enterprise engagement.

Opportunity

The Opportunity

At their 20-year mark, Lululemon faced the problem every successful brand eventually confronts: the market had caught up. Wellness was everywhere. Athleisure was everywhere. And when everything looks like you, the danger isn't losing customers, it's losing meaning. The opportunity was hiding in plain sight. Lululemon had something most brands spend decades trying to manufacture: a genuinely devoted community.

Challenge

The Challenge

How do you translate authentic community devotion into a brand position that feels earned rather than extracted? How do you elevate without alienating? How do you write a manifesto for people who already know what they believe, without telling them what to believe? That's the line we had to walk. High-end but accessible. Confident but not prescriptive.

Approach

The Approach

I started where most brands don't: with listening. Before any strategy, I spent time inside Lululemon's community, not to validate assumptions, but to understand what the brand actually meant to people's lives. What emerged wasn't surprising in hindsight, but it was clarifying: people weren't buying athletic wear. They were buying a philosophy. So we made it explicit. Every touchpoint, physical spaces, programming, events, and language, was designed to reflect that philosophy back to the community. The repositioning landed because it wasn't invented. It was excavated.

Opportunity

The Opportunity

Saks Fifth Avenue had built an iconic legacy in luxury retail, but faced an identity crisis in a rapidly evolving market. Younger consumers saw them as prestigious but disconnected from contemporary culture. The real opportunity: Saks had something competitors didn't, institutional credibility, heritage, and access to cultural moments. They needed to reposition from "luxury retailer" to "cultural curator."

Challenge

The Challenge

Reposition Saks Fifth Avenue as a high-end cultural authority that could speak to both legacy customers and emerging cultural leaders. Balance sophistication with accessibility. Create a brand narrative that felt earned, not desperate. Make them feel like the epicenter of culture, not a museum.

Approach

The Approach

We started by mapping Saks' actual cultural touchpoints, their real assets. The iconic 5th Avenue windows as a stage for artists. The basement speakeasy vibe. Their fashion book tradition. Their ability to bring together artists, designers, and tastemakers. We developed a complete visual and narrative identity that positioned Saks as a cultural brand first, retailer second. Bold, contemporary, unapologetically cultural, NYC street culture meets luxury refinement.

Saks Fifth Avenue experiential design, high-end retail creative

Opportunity

The Opportunity

Beneath the rhinestones, parody, and pop-culture exhaustion was something real: the work of Don Ed Hardy, a legendary tattoo artist whose sailor-style flash helped define a visual language of rebellion, danger, romance, and American underground culture. The opportunity was not to erase the brand's messy past. It was to reclaim the original voltage underneath it. Ed Hardy had what most fashion brands try to manufacture: mythology, iconography, attitude, and a history too loud to fake.

Challenge

The Challenge

Reintroduce Ed Hardy without pretending the collapse never happened. The brand had been overexposed, diluted, and turned into a punchline through rhinestone hats, celebrity excess, and endless licensing. It was not just out of style, it was culturally radioactive. The challenge was to turn toxicity into tension. Bring the brand back with enough self-awareness to acknowledge the damage, enough confidence to laugh at it, and enough creative authority to remind people what made Ed Hardy dangerous in the first place.

Approach

The Approach

We went back to the source: tattoo art, punk attitude, sailor flash, hard edges, iconic silhouettes, and the raw mythology of a brand built on skin before it ever lived on clothing. Instead of hiding from the chaos, we used it. In true punk fashion, the comeback became part confession, part provocation. Yeah, that happened. We saw it too. Now we're back. No apologies. No rhinestones. No polished reinvention designed to please everyone. The visual world leaned into dark humor, sharp styling, edgy set design, and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. We reframed Ed Hardy as both new and historic: a brand with scars, stories, and enough original fire to burn through the joke.

Ed Hardy Too Soon campaign, tattoo culture and punk attitude

Opportunity

The Opportunity

Retail was dying. Landlords had vacant storefronts they couldn't fill. Brands had no way to reach customers authentically. Communities had lost the gathering spaces that made neighborhoods feel alive. But those three problems pointed to the same solution. What if you created cultural spaces so compelling that landlords would pay you to open them, brands would fight to activate them, and communities would live in them?

Challenge

The Challenge

Transform retail into cultural destinations, then prove it was a business model, not a passion project. That meant solving three things at once: making it scalable across five NYC locations, making it profitable without compromising authenticity, and making it so culturally magnetic that people got tattoos without being asked.

Approach

The Approach

We started with a single insight: the best brands are communities first, merchants second. Everything else followed from that. We targeted abandoned retail in neighborhoods with creative energy, built genuine cultural hubs with events and community gatherings, and let brands earn entry through cultural credibility. Saks, Lululemon, Maxim, Getty Images, CBGB, Ed Hardy, they all came to us. Five locations across NYC. Landlords paid us to open. People got tattoos.

Good Luck Dry Cleaners NYC, cultural community retail space

Opportunity

The Opportunity

Brands were stuck in a one-way relationship with consumers. Digital loyalty programs felt transactional and disconnected. Meanwhile, blockchain technology was creating new possibilities for digital asset ownership, but no one had figured out how to make it accessible at scale or integrated into physical consumer touchpoints. We saw an opportunity to bridge this gap: what if existing gaming and vending machines could become distribution channels for digital assets?

Challenge

The Challenge

The core challenge wasn't hardware. It was software architecture. We needed to build a patent-pending engine capable of managing on-chain digital asset distribution at enterprise scale, creating compelling game mechanics, integrating with existing physical infrastructure, and proving the software could drive lasting engagement.

Approach

The Approach

We started with a claw machine as a physical proof-of-concept, demonstrating how software could redefine brand engagement through distribution and gamification. The machine wasn't the business. It was the evidence. What the claw machine proved was something more fundamental: software could manufacture a dopamine flywheel between a brand and its consumer, turning a single interaction into a self-reinforcing loop of engagement, reward, and return. That insight was always the intention to scale. Following its success, I assembled an unprecedented team, bringing together leaders from Spotify, Nike, Apple, Rockstar Games, to form RKD (pronounced arcade) and scale the gamification engine for enterprise.

Degen Arcade, blockchain gaming and digital asset distribution platform

UNDED Games, enterprise gamification engine and product design

RKD gamification platform, on-chain digital asset engagement technology

About

Jeremy Penn

Long before directing creative, shaping experiences, or designing technology, I thought about form, weight, and tension.

Fine art was my foundation. Fifteen years as a working artist taught me how meaning is constructed, how ideas take shape, and why certain things stay with people while others fade.

Those same principles now inform everything I build. Over the last two decades, I've used them to shape brands, products, experiences, and emerging technologies, helping turn ideas into things that earn a place in the world.

The work tends to feel considered rather than assembled. That's not an accident.

Jeremy Penn, Senior Creative Director and Cultural Strategist specializing in experiential design and consumer technology, based in New York

Brand Practice

Storytelling

gives it meaning.

Art Direction

gives it form.

Experience

makes it felt.

Technology

gives it reach.

Contact

Jeremy Penn, Senior Creative Director & Brand Strategist

Creative

Lululemon

Saks Fifth Avenue

Ed Hardy

Good Luck Dry Cleaners

Degen Arcade

The Opportunity

The Challenge

The Approach

The Opportunity

The Challenge

The Approach

The Opportunity

The Challenge

The Approach

The Opportunity

The Challenge

The Approach

The Opportunity

The Challenge

The Approach

Jeremy Penn

Storytelling

Art Direction

Experience

Technology

The Zen Monkey doesn't check email. I do.