The 5th Star.

The idea

Chicago can do something amazing to earn that 5th star.

The four stars on the Chicago flag each mark something that happened: Fort Dearborn, the Great Fire, the World's Columbian Exposition, the Century of Progress. Every one was an event, a moment in the past. But what if the fifth star wasn't a moment at all? What if it was a direction?

A cause the whole city could get behind and say: if we did this, it would warrant adding a star to the flag. The initiative might take so long that Chicago earns back the rights to its own parking meters before we get there. That's fine. It's a heading, not a deadline. Something we can all rally behind.

I spend a lot of time preaching about One Target Customer, the single person a business builds everything around. It turns out a city could use the same kind of clarity. Family of mine who fight for equality have a version of it they keep coming back to: make the world safe for a sixteen-year-old Black trans kid, and everybody is better off. Something with that kind of gravity. One north star for a whole community.

The false start

I made the merch first.

Naturally, I tried to launch it by selling merch. I put the fifth star on hats and hoodies and tees, spun up a little store, and then never promoted it. Never put a dollar into marketing it. It just sat there. So consider this its first real billboard.