Hola Sugarcups,
Today, any fashion brand has an unlimited content resource. The most scarce and valuable content any industry has is content that is human and has a human brand voice.
My email inbox has been flooded with fashion brands eager to talk all the while. From smaller indie London brands to mid size brands with real marketing teams and actual editors – they’ve all had a go with AI content tools and now they need our help to sound more human / like themselves. But how do we even sound like ourselves? And why is that even harder now we’re in 2026 and the AI revolution?
What AI Content Really Is (Let’s Be Honest!)
A brief caveat-I’m not attempting to make a blanket case for the anti usage of generative AI content tools. I regularly use them myself for research and structure, especially when I’m feeling stuck. Because I am aware of how these tools work, I am sure that generative AI language models are simply sophisticated very large pattern recognition engines that have been trained on incredible volumes of text to generate individual pieces of content that, at the end of the day, are virtually indistinguishable from the best human writing in every style. And that is the problem.
The most human fashion content creates brand love because it speaks to your customer in a way that is interesting and different. And I can also tell you that it’s statistically significant too. It’s hyper targeted, ultra personal and beyond passionate because your brand can’t be, it’s not you!
This can’t be done by AI. The model is very good at mimicking and producing copy but a ‘warm, personal tone’ is a very different thing from having your own personal writer, with their own experience and views.
Here is going to make a difference with your clients: Customers that stay with you for years and speak honestly with your new ideas and claims.
What Brand Voice Really Means (And People Never Talk About)
I’m always surprised when every brand founder I speak to wants to address the question of their brand voice. Because, honestly, your brand voice isn’t about a document that explains how your brand should sound. It isn’t about commas, style guides, exclamation points, and adjectives. It is about the jokes, references, viewpoints, opinions, stories, and observations that make up your brand.
What you see here on this page (Raw and Toasted) is not ‘warm, warm, wise and playful’. It is exact. It has had a life in the UK and in India; it’s as unique as its aesthetic, it’s got pet peeves about how you write about fashion, we know exactly how it injects humour into something serious and we treat you as an intelligent human not a moronic dullard. No AI can do that. Not really. Not well.
Ghostwriters Are More Important Than Ever
Otherwise, you might think, if every brand has content tools that are AI, then the outcome is a scenario where every writer is having the same tools, the content, the text, writing to the statistical average of the sample set. If every brand has content, that isn’t differentiating anymore. Your differentiation is a brand voice that none can replicate but us. And for fashion brands, that’s one of your greatest tools in the tool kit. That’s what makes people want to click on your email newsletter, that’s what makes your product descriptions convert, and that’s what makes new customers feel like they really stumbled upon something real in their first experience.
That’s a human skill. Building that point of view. Following it through, keeping it real to the founder (or brand) instead of some anonymous faceless machine. It’s what I’ve been doing for 20 odd years with fashion founders and their CMOs. Whatever I have written (their newsletter copy, their brand story, their LinkedIn, their editorial and launch copy), this isn’t writing content, this is knowing someone so well that I can whip up their content in a way that will blow their mind (and AI just can’t do this).
Examples
A real example of this (help with the specs!):Our co-founder @lilajjones was asked to fill in some content for her brand, so she sent specs for an Instagram caption about their new, terracotta coloured linen shirt: “London based sustainable label. English or Italian made. Design conscious 28-45, 40 year average customer age’. Caption will be warm, talking about the Italian linen fabric in the fading afternoon sun, perhaps about slow living/thoughtful style. Great content, but so would be any one of the 400+ brands we are now followed by.
A founder spends 3 sessions with a ghostwriter to understand more about them, their brand and what they want to say: “The reason we have the Terracotta shirt is because of a chat I had with a dyer in Jaipur. She was so mad that European fashion labels called Indian dyeing techniques artisan in their marketing copy. She’d never even been to a workshop. This is the solution.”
Because no AI tool has this information, or anything like this, in this format and length. If customized for the founder, give the brand a trump card no competitor can ever have, because they will not have had this conversation with the dyer in Jaipur.
This story is going to be read by the ghostwriter, who will listen to its heartbeat and make it sing.
AI Assisted Ghostwriting
Be totally honest with you: I outsourced to AI. I have AI do a bit of the research, help me create my outline, and even write the first draft (that I then comb through with a fine-tooth comb). I think of AI as an ultra speedy, all-in-one researcher. But as far as fully understanding the voice of the brand or person, getting into their head and crafting a product that they can connect to — that is one I will never outsource to AI. That’s very much a human skill and in 2026 it will be vital.
What It Means To You
Founder of fashion brand:Using AI content creation tools versus using human content support? Both! They handle the lead gen – all the low value/high volume stuff, like product descriptions, first drafts, research, scheduling. They do that stuff insanely quickly. What you need a human for is support for anything you’d want to sound like a real person – founder communication, mission, newsletters, editorial, whatever your customers look at to prove you’re a real person: this is where the investment of your brand’s equity will come to fruition, if you’re the founder who’s doing it all alone and exhausted and inconsistent. This is the conversation I can support you to have.
The sound of your brand is already in you. It is. And sometimes, you need someone who can listen.
Jasmin x
P.S. If you want to see what I’m talking about in practice, the TikTok Shop piece I wrote earlier in this series applies the same logic to platform content strategy. And for the behind-the-scenes on what building this kind of work actually feels like, go read Chuffed Doesn’t Cover It that one’s personal, and it’s where this whole conversation started.
