Here's what keeps happening. Something starts out specific, weird, alive. People fall in love with it. Then the pressure comes to grow. Or you've been doing it so long you've grown bored with your own work. Maybe you've never been able to articulate the magic that made people fall in love with you in the first place.
 

So you start looking around. Start chasing trends. Start sanding down the weird edges. Dulling the specific obsessions. You wonder if you've been left behind and start copying what other people are doing.
 

And then you wonder why nobody cares anymore.
 

I'm the person who walks in and says: STOP. What made you special is still there. Let's find it, name it, protect it, and find the freshest, most alive expression of it. Not nostalgia. A celebration and a fresh take at the same time. Honoring the root and finding the new branch.
 

Anyone can play reruns and celebrate what was. Anyone can plant a new tree. Not everyone knows how to tend the roots. The hard thing, the valuable thing, is doing both at once.

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An obsession of mine

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Marshmallow Fluff isn't advertised. They don't need to. It's so specifically, deeply itself that it belongs to a place and a people and a memory in a way that can't be manufactured. It IS the East Coast. I grew up in Massachusetts where a Fluffernutter is the people's choice for state sandwich, moved to California in the '90s and was genuinely shocked to find that Fluff didn't exist there. So I wrote the company a silly letter asking why, and they wrote me a silly one back! I told everyone. Friends started sending me jars. Two of my friends brought me home an entire case from their honeymoon. A Boston airport security agent, also shocked to learn that there was no Fluff in California, upgraded them to first class. I make Fluff art, I collect Fluff art. My logo is a Fluff jar with my name on it. My dear friend Allee Willis threw a Fluff party at Willis Wonderland in my honor, and then we traveled across the country to the Fluff Festival together. I am in the Fluff 100-year history book. And that's when I saw it in writing, I am a Fluff superfan.
 

I don't market Fluff. I just love it so hard and so specifically that other people get curious. They want to know why. And then they can't help but start loving it too.
 

It becomes contagious. And it's the most powerful force in culture.
 

It's also exactly what I help create.
 

I didn't learn this in a boardroom or rising the ranks in a creative agency. I learned it by living inside culture. Observing. Participating. Documenting. Caring deeply, obsessively, about things most people dismissed as frivolous.

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At some point I stopped trying to fit in and became Rusty Blazenhoff. Professional Free Spirit. And I never looked back.

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By following those instincts I landed a decade-long collaboration with the legendary Paul Reubens on his Pee-wee Herman universe. Together we honored his adult fans and welcomed new generations into his world. When my dear friend, visionary artist and songwriter Allee Willis died, I was the obvious choice to help carry her creative legacy forward. I knew her world from the inside.
 

Not because I had a playbook. Because I intuitively know how to find and protect what makes things special. 
 

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for this work. What I bring is the ability to walk in, find the thing that makes you loved, and help you give people the best possible experience of that. Then find your culture carriers. The ones who love you so specifically and so hard that other people get curious. The ones who will carry what you've built somewhere it hasn't been yet. Honor them. Give them something worth spreading.
 

Pay attention to what people love about you before you ask them to pay attention to you. That's what I mean when I say earn attention by giving it.
 

Rusty Blazenhoff
Professional Free Spirit