Stop Calling It Community. You're Running a Group Chat With Merch.

Let’s get something straight.

You do not have a community. You have an audience. And calling your email list a “community” doesn’t change the fact that the relationship only goes one direction… from you, at them, with a discount code.

I’ve spent the last few years seeing D2C brands throw the word “community” around like it’s a growth hack. It’s on every pitch deck. It’s in every brand strategy doc. It’s in the Substack bio of every founder who just read a Seth Godin book for the first time.

“We’re building community.”

No. You’re building a group chat with merch. And there’s a massive difference.

Go check your favourite brand’s Discord right now. Seriously, go look. I’ll wait.

So? A welcome channel from 2023. A “general” chat where someone asked about shipping times six months ago. Maybe a bot posting automated product drops to nobody.

The pattern is everywhere. Brand launches community space. Brand posts welcome message. Brand schedules “community manager” to post three times a week. Nobody replies. Community manager quietly gets reassigned to TikTok. Server stays open because nobody wants to admit the experiment failed.

What happened: brands saw that the early magic of certain cult D2C brands felt like community and thought the secret ingredient was the platform. So they spun up Discords and Facebook Groups and Slack channels and Geneva rooms, and then stood at the front of an empty hall wondering why nobody showed up.

The platform was never the thing. Tension. That, was the secret sauce.

The brands that actually have community didn’t build it by opening a group chat. They built it by picking a fight.

Represent is one of the most instructive examples. George Heaton built that brand on a council estate in Manchester and never once pretended otherwise. The community wasn’t built in a Slack channel. But in the tension between streetwear that costs £200 and a founder who talks like he’s still at the local. People buy Represent, but the signal to pay attention to is the way they defend it online. That’s big identity energy.

Or look at Corteiz. Clint419 turned a West London streetwear brand into a cultural phenomenon by doing everything the textbook says not to do. No paid ads, drops announced via cryptic Instagram stories, physical locations revealed hours before opening. The “community” is a shared experience of chaos, scarcity, and cultural insider knowledge. You can’t copy that with a membership tier.

Passenger — a UK outdoor brand most marketing people have never heard of — did it differently. They built community around a genuine commitment to environmental storytelling and van life culture. No paid community platform. No gated content. Just a brand that stood for something specific enough that the right people found each other through it.

If your brand doesn’t have tension, you don’t have community. Period.

This is the one that really gets me.

I see founders calling their newsletter subscribers their “community” all the time. I’ve seen pitch decks that literally say: “We have a community of 15,000”, and when you dig in, it’s a Mailchimp list with a 19% open rate. We can’t call that a community. It’s a mailing list. And a mediocre one at that.

A community implies reciprocity. It implies that the people in it get something from each other, not just from you. Your email subscribers don’t know each other. They don’t talk to each other. They have no shared identity beyond the fact that they once clicked a pop-up on your website.

That’s fine.
Email lists are powerful.
But calling them a community is like calling your Uber driver your chauffeur. Technically someone is driving you around, but let’s not pretend there’s a relationship there.

And then there’s the worst offender: the paid “community” that’s just a course with a Slack channel bolted on.

You know the ones. “Join our exclusive founder community — £49/month.” You sign up. You get access to a Slack workspace with 200 people who are all lurking, a Notion database of “resources” that haven’t been updated since C**id19, and a monthly “ask me anything” that three people attend.

Again, we can’t call this a community. It’s a subscription product wearing community as a costume because “community” converts better than “content library” on a landing page. And the people running these things know it. They use the word “community” because it implies belonging, intimacy, and access — all things that are nearly impossible to deliver at scale for £49 a month.

If your “community” would die the second you stopped posting in it, it’s simply a content feed with a paywall.

Since I’ve just spent 800 words tearing things down, let me rebuild. What does real community look like when brands actually earn it?:

Scuffers (Madrid streetwear) built their following by sending product to actual friends before launches. Not influencers, friends. The TikTok hashtag hit 30M views organically. Their pop-ups feature DJ sets and after-parties. Nobody’s calling it “community-led growth” on a slide deck. They’re just living it.

Madhappy picked a fight with fashion’s obsession with aspiration by saying: what if a clothing brand was honest about how people actually feel? The tension between luxury streetwear and emotional vulnerability created a brand people tattoo on their bodies. That’s not a customer. That’s an apostle.

Three Ships (Canadian skincare) created “The Fleet” — a customer community where members give personal discount codes to friends and family. It works because they stood for transparency first. Customers had a reason to evangelise. The community was a consequence, of a smart tactic.

Harley-Davidson remains the masterclass. Their riders don’t call themselves “Harley customers.” They’re riders. They have patches. They have a whole identity infrastructure that exists independently of the company that makes the bikes. Remove Harley from the equation and those people would still find each other.

Three things most brands never build:

The members see themselves as part of something, not just customers of something.

The community creates value for itself. Members help each other, teach each other, challenge each other. If you removed the brand entirely, the people would still have a reason to stay connected.

Leaving means losing something more than just access to a product or discount: relationships, status, identity. If someone can leave your “community” and feel nothing, you never had one.

Here’s what I’d respect: a founder who says, “We don’t have a community yet. We have customers who like our product. We’re working on giving them reasons to connect with each other.”

That’s honest. That’s a strategy. That’s something you can actually build from.

What I can’t respect is the founder who slaps “community-led growth” on a slide deck, points at a dead Discord server, and calls it traction. Let’s call a spade, a spade… this spade is called performance.

Community isn’t a channel. It’s not a feature. It’s not a Slack workspace or a loyalty programme or a hashtag. Community is what happens when people choose each other — not just your product.

Build something worth choosing. The community will follow.

Or don’t — and keep running your little group chat with merch.

— Ayo

P.S. If your brand is stuck in the loop of rebuilding the same revenue every month, I wrote something about that. It’s called The Culture Engine and it’s the most honest thing I’ve written about what’s actually broken in most D2C brands.

- [Why Gen Z is Making Marketers Sweat — The Funnel is Dead]
- [How Microtrends Are Hijacking Marketing]

The Wedge Framework: a one-page diagnostic to find the cultural tension your brand should own. Reply “WEDGE” or send me a message and I’ll send it over.