What If Brands Had Dreams?

Unsure about how your Tuesday is going, but today we feel like going inside the subconscious of your (or maybe our) favorite brands — the fears, fantasies, and 3 a.m. anxieties they’ll never post on LinkedIn.

It is fun.

We spend so much time talking about brand tone of voice, visual identity, mission statements. But what if we threw the brief out the window and asked a weirder question:

What would your brand dream about?

If brands were people (and let’s be real — they kind of are), they’d have inner worlds. Soft spots. Repressed memories. Wild fantasies. Some brands would dream in Helvetica. Others in slime green and glitch. Some wake up screaming “authenticity!” and wonder why they feel so empty.

So let’s dim the lights, put on a Sade playlist, and lie down on the couch. It’s time to read some dream journals that we may have created for the fun of brand profiling. Let's go!

Vacation®

Dreamt it was 1987 forever. The sun never set. Everyone smelled like poolside leisure and regret.

Vacation dreams of being your sunscreen, your perfume, your lifestyle — all wrapped in a retro fantasy. Their branding is a full sensory vacation: fake ads, fake awards, real SPF. It doesn’t sell sun protection. It sells “the world’s best-smelling sunscreen” like it’s a bottle of time travel.

Dieux Skin

Dreamt it was the softest thing in a sterile world. A cloud in a lab coat.

Dieux doesn’t just sell moisturizer — it sells clinical softness. The kind that looks like whipped clouds. These visuals? They’re not just pretty. They’re a contradiction: sterile and surreal, exact and emotional. This is dream-sequence branding for the skincare-obsessed. Formulas backed by science, packaged like a lucid dream. A cream so good, it floats.

A24

Dreamt it was in a hallway lit by a single fluorescent bulb. Someone’s whispering. You’re not sure if it’s a horror or a love story. The credits roll anyway.

A24 dreams in aspect ratios. It doesn’t sell movies — it sells feeling things deeply, stylishly, and sometimes with a slow zoom. Its branding is cultish, obsessive, and self-aware in a way that feels like it’s watching you back. The merch is cryptic. The Instagram feels like a moodboard for your next crisis. The dream is: being misunderstood — beautifully.

MSCHF

Dreamt it was banned in five countries, trending in twenty. A courtroom sketch artist tried to capture it. They couldn’t.

MSCHF doesn’t launch products — it drops cultural glitches. From Big Red Boots to blurred-out handbags, it lives in the tension between satire and consumerism. Every release is a prank with a price tag, a headline disguised as hype. The dream? Being the internet’s favorite troublemaker — the brand that knows the system too well not to mess with it.

That’s the thing about good branding — it’s not just aesthetics or tone of voice. It’s a whole inner life. When it’s done right, you don’t need a strategy deck to “get it.” You just know. You could guess its dream journal, finish its sentences, predict what it orders for breakfast.

Great brands blend into your world like a friend you know inside out. They’re not shouting for your attention — they’re already in your group chat. And when a brand makes you feel that seen, that synced? That’s not marketing. That’s magic.

Thank you for spending time at the Trend Desk