The other day I was enjoying my usual morning coffee with the regular C4 brains trust. Old mate Noel was yarning about a recent experience he’d had where he’d gone into a shop wearing his favourite Cactus pants, only to have a staff member corner him for thirty minutes to rave about how awesome Cactus is.
It’s actually a regular occurrence. The other day, while parked up for a play in the snow on Porters Pass, the driver of the vehicle parked next to me started to regale me with stories about just how much he loves his plethora of Cactus gear. It happens often enough now that I’ve almost stopped being surprised by it, which is a strange thing to admit about your own customers.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately as I review our financial performance for the last tax year. We’ve done fine, grown revenue, and remained profitable despite difficult times. But we’re not the absolute rocketship that you might think. Slow, sustainable and organic growth is very much our model, and it always has been, even when that’s been unfashionable.
So, while our financial performance probably doesn’t get investment bankers’ blood pressure rising, something else just might.
You see, in this day and age, attention, followership, recognition and a loyal community are becoming metrics that matter at least as much, maybe even more than, current financial performance. We’re in an age when anyone can conjure up a brand out of the ether. AI tools allow branding, messaging, narrative and shiny imagery to be created at the blink of an eye. What cannot be created, however, is the real gold: genuine customer appreciation and loyalty.
That’s the bit that keeps catching me off guard. A stranger in a car park, unprompted, wanting to talk for twenty minutes about a pair of pants. A guy in a shop, ambushed by an enthusiastic staffer who just can’t help themselves. You can’t buy that. You can’t prompt an LLM into manufacturing it. You can fake the aesthetic of a beloved brand pretty convincingly these days, but you cannot fake the moment when someone who has no reason to say anything at all decides to say something anyway.
And this, I think, is the thing that a lot of commentary on the modern economy misses. We spend so much time obsessing over top-line growth, over the hockey stick chart, over the next funding round, that we forget there’s a second ledger being kept, one that doesn’t show up in the P&L but absolutely shows up in the long-term value of a business. Call it the trust ledger, or the community ledger, or whatever you like. It’s the accumulated weight of every good experience a customer has had, every product that did what it said it would, every interaction where the brand behaved like it actually cared rather than like it was extracting value.
The reason this matters more now than it used to is precisely because of how easy it’s become to fake the surface. Twenty years ago, if you wanted a professional-looking brand, you needed real capital, real designers, real production values. That was itself a kind of signal. If a company could afford to look polished, there was a reasonable chance it had its act together operationally too. That correlation is gone. Today a business with zero customers and zero runway can have a beautiful website, a slick Instagram feed, and marketing copy that reads like it was written by someone with twenty years of brand experience, because in a sense, it was, just compressed into a prompt and a few seconds of compute.
Which means the market is going to have to get better at distinguishing performative brand from actual brand. And the tell, increasingly, isn’t going to be found in the marketing at all. It’s going to be found in the unscripted moments: the guy in the car park, the customer who corners a stranger in a shop, the review that wasn’t incentivised, the repeat purchase that happens quietly without any retargeting ad nudging it along. Those moments are expensive to build and impossible to fake, because they’re not really things a company does to a customer. They’re things a customer does, of their own accord, because the relationship earned it.
For us, that’s always been the bet. We’ve never chased the growth at all costs model, and there have absolutely been years where I’ve looked at flashier competitors and wondered if we were leaving money on the table. But I keep coming back to those unscripted moments as the real proof of concept. You can’t put “random bloke evangelising your pants in a car park” on a slide for investors, but if you could measure it, I suspect it would tell you more about the durability of a business than most of the numbers that do make the slide.
It’s worth saying too that this isn’t some retrospective piece of brand mythology we’ve cooked up after the fact. It’s genuinely how we’ve tried to run things from the start: treat people well, make good gear, don’t chase the quarterly number at the expense of the longer game, and trust that the rest follows. It’s slower. It’s less exciting to talk about at a pitch competition. But it compounds in a way that’s hard to replicate once you’ve skipped the steps.
So yes, our tax year was solid rather than spectacular. But if the real currency of this next era of business is trust, attention and genuine loyalty, the stuff no algorithm can synthesise, then I reckon we’re sitting on more value than the balance sheet lets on. And I’ll take that trade every time.
