‘Creativity was an escape’: Pavel Dler reflects on the rise of Culted

Spending those formative years in the home of Van Gogh and Rembrandt left a mark on him as he was introduced to the arts from a very young age. “I would draw all the time. And when I was about 14 years old, my parents wanted to move to England for job opportunities. And when we moved, I looked up art schools online and came across Central Saint Martins.”

Initially drawn in by the school’s impressive alumni, which has included Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, Dler was awarded a place on the Fashion Design with Marketing course in 2013. “Creativity was an escape for me, with what I had gone through as a child. I also watched lots of Fashion TV from a very young age.”

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Dler soon discovered that designing wasn’t quite for him. Instead, he was drawn to the fantasy of the fashion world. “The visual world of marketing and content creation was more my cup of tea.”

A ‘rogue’ area

Around 2016, Dler began freelancing as a consultant for fashion brands. At the time, influencer marketing was still relatively ‘rogue’ within the wider marketing and advertising landscape. “I would bring together influencers with brands and I would have a group of photographers or videographers I would collaborate with, create the content with influencers and manage the content going live. “And while I was working on my materials and research for brands, I came across short-form video as a format and how it was becoming popular in Asia. At the same time, I was reading lots of articles and I thought that there must be more engaging ways to communicate information about fashion, art and lifestyle, rather than just articles, especially for younger audiences.” He began experimenting with influencers, having them present scripted content in video format, which they then started posting on Instagram. It was all about creating ‘informative’ content tailored to younger audiences. “That’s how Culted, very organically, came to be. What helped from very early on was tapping my network of creators and influencers to be featured in the content and to collaborate. And all of this was published on Instagram in 2019. We got noticed, actually, by TikTok itself. Its media team asked us to publish content on its app because TikTok was trying to diversify its own content.” If you recall, around this time, the ByteDance-owned app was, in fact, mostly dancing videos. “Within the first weeks of publishing our first videos there, we had millions of views on some of our fashion show reviews. Because it was so unusual at the time that there would be a 60-second fashion show review in a video format. At the time, they were just in articles.” He describes these videos as ‘infotainment,’ a mix of journalism and entertainment.

Everyone wants to be popular with Gen Z

With 1.7 million followers on TikTok, Culted has clearly found its audience, 70% of which, to this day, are under 24 years old. “The plan was always to focus on Gen Z, because I knew very well that they would be a very influential generation. And of course, they were going to enter the workforce and they were going to be the next target audience for the world of luxury, well, every sector.” Dler says one of the best things about Culted’s early days was that he and the team didn’t have to work hard to “gain the trust” of Gen Z or devise a strategic plan to grow that audience. Culted was already showing up on platforms Gen Z knew and trusted, speaking their language and engaging with them in ways they actually wanted from a media outlet. “I still think that there are some untapped opportunities in both the world of publishing and creative agency sector. I think Gen Z and Gen A, generally, are still underestimated by a lot of brands and publishers. Everyone talks about them, everyone wants to be popular among them, but not many people actually take that much action.”

A place of discovery

Since its inception, Dler has envisioned Culted as a “place of discovery,” a platform to spotlight new trends, designers and artists and to serve as a source of inspiration. “For young audiences, being knowledgeable is a flex. It’s really important to them. Young audiences have a huge appetite to learn.” On TikTok, Dler notes that over half of the platform’s top-performing content is educational in some way, bite-sized, informative shorts that feed that hunger for knowledge. It is something that the Culted team is always championing when it comes to its work with brand partners.

“We’re always encouraging them to act like publishers, to act like entertainers. There’s so much appetite from young individuals who want to learn about the brands, who want to learn about their archives, who their ex-creative directors were. It’s not all about just pushing product out in an entertaining way to connect with young students. This is also about connecting with them in a meaningful way by opening your doors and telling them about who you are as a brand.”

One example is the work Culted has been doing with Prada for the past three years, reaching 2 million followers on the Italian brand’s TikTok account, which was a “huge” benchmark. Dler explains that when a legacy brand like that comes to his team, the brief is usually, “How do we get involved in internet culture?” The social media KPIs are typically second or third on the list.

“Brands can achieve things like impressions, for example, very easily, but getting involved in the conversation and internet culture is the challenging part, actually. And creating content that resonates, and that audiences talk about, is difficult for brands.”

One example was Culted’s work with Jimmy Choo on a Christmas campaign, helping the brand gain 25,000 new followers on its TikTok account through eight pieces of organic content.

“One user commented that they thought it was a meme video,” laughs Dler. “That’s a positive sentiment, for individuals to feel like it’s a meme video or a video created by a creator rather than a brand. That’s always our objective and what partners look for when they come to us.”

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With every project, Dler and his team run focus groups with “tastemakers” from the Culted community to gather their opinions and understand what they “expect” from brands.Navigating the balance between brand heritage and internet culture is tricky and people are quick to call out work that feels inauthentic. “We’ve always been very cautious. There are legacy brands that we work with, like Mont Blanc for example, and what we do with them versus what we do with Marc Jacobs or Jacquemus is very different. We are very considerate with how we present brands in a social media landscape, because it’s something that you can’t force. It’s a shame to disregard what a brand has always stood for, what its archives are about, what its heritage is, just to create a piece of content that will go viral.” He explains that it shouldn’t be about chasing big numbers for the sake of it, especially at the expense of a brand’s reputation. Instead, it’s about merging all facets of the brand to create a moment that people will genuinely appreciate.

Creative agency offerings

Over the years, Culted’s brand work has been built on “word of mouth” and has happened quite organically. Now, it’s formalizing that with its creative studio Rad Studio and the team’s expansion, under managing director Rob O’Shea. “We recently had a company reach out to us and say, ‘We’ve heard about you, TikTok has recommended you as a creative partner, but we can’t find anything about your creative agency online,’” laughs Dler. “It has fuelled us to formalize our creative agency.” The studio’s core services will include insights and strategy, creative production, distribution and amplification and white label services. It has a team of around 20 people and accounts for 50% of Culted’s business.

For Dler, what excites him the most is the media world and its fast-paced nature. As of this year, he became a British Citizen and also father to twin boys, Harrison and Hector, keeping him busy.

On Culted’s future he shared: “I love how committed our audience is and how engaged they are with our content. They fuel everything that we do, they speed up our growth. Over the past few years, there has been this big snowball effect for us and I’m determined to keep that going.”