By accepted gospel of product management, my experience in part II of this trilogy should have warded me off analogue photography and the search for friction forever. I should have retreated into contactless, algorithmic comfort. Instead, I went out looking for more.

It’s just before two in the afternoon. I’m sat in the back room of a pub in Liverpool, John Lennon staring down at me from the wall, expression equal parts disinterest and derision. Unsurprising, given I’ve just placed a Kodak from 1996 on the saloon bar table. There’s no point taking any pictures in here, it’s too dark and I’m using a roll of Fujifilm that expired 20 years ago. Old film stock is unpredictable, so better not waste the shots in badly lit rooms.

There's a particular kind of strategic paralysis that sets in when someone from the board - or a consultant, or a competitor's press release - tells you that digital transformation is coming for your category. You need to create a Luxury Digital strategy. The room gets serious. Roadmaps get built. Budget conversations start. And at some point, probably within eighteen months, you're affixing a fitness tracker to the Milanese-mesh bracelet of a 6-grand watch and calling it inn

For decades the businesses of expertise, craftsmanship and luxury have run on a simple exchange: you paid for authority because authority was grounded in the living presence of a specific person. A marketer. A strategist. A lawyer. Someone who could sit across from you, who had walked through the problem themselves, whose judgement was embodied in a living mind that you could hire and pay. Presence became the marker of truth. Not the accuracy of what they said, but the fact t