Insiders #196 · 2025
Time After Time
The endless catalog has collapsed past, present, and future into one participatory now. What remains valuable when everything can be recalled, remixed, and made instantly available?
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Co-Founder & CRO
Future Commerce ↗
Commerce is never just commerce.
I’m Brian Lange. I work where commerce, culture, media, and technology stop pretending they’re separate.
↓01 About
I build the business of looking around corners.
I co-founded Future Commerce in 2016. Today, it’s an independent media and research company for the people shaping the next decade of retail.
My work connects commercial strategy to the less measurable forces that actually move people: myth, media, art, place, participation, memory, and meaning.
That takes many forms—building partnerships, producing research, hosting conversations, convening people, and writing essays that resist the easy answer.
Future Commerce 2016—Now
Rightpoint 2017—2023
Magento Association Founding Task Force
“The past is always in stock, the future is on pre-order, and the present is a single infinite-scrollable pane of now.”
From “Time After Time” ↗02 Selected writing
Essays on the strange machinery behind what we buy.
Brands as myths. Time as inventory. Art as strategy. Place as something commerce can either deepen—or smooth away.
Insiders #183 · 2024
Mythopoeic Brands
Brands are constructed realities. The enduring ones leave room for people to observe, participate, reinterpret, and keep the myth alive.
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Insiders #185 · 2025
Blue Velvet-Clad Athleisure
A personal essay about David Lynch, the Snoqualmie Valley, and what disappears when commerce turns a place into frictionless content.
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Insiders #048 · 2020
Storytelling is Insufficient
A case for moving beyond brand narrative toward original art, cultural integrity, and products that can inhabit a world larger than marketing.
Read the essay ↗03 Listen
A decade-long conversation about commerce—and everything it touches.
Alongside Phillip Jackson, I co-host the Future Commerce podcast: weekly conversations that use retail as a way into culture, technology, and the behavior of real people.
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