“World building” has quickly become one of tech’s favorite phrases.
In AI, it means creating immersive digital environments you can actually move through and explore. The race is on to see which frontier lab can build the most convincing digital worlds, and World Labs’ newly released Atlas model shows just how fast the technology is moving: it can generate, reconstruct, and simulate 3D worlds from images and video, with precise camera control and up to a minute of 1440p video.
While tech is trying to build worlds people can enter digitally, culture’s most compelling companies have already learned that the way to matter is to build a world people want to organize their real lives around.
But while tech is working to build worlds people can enter digitally, some of today’s most culturally relevant brands are building worlds people want to be part of in real life.
These companies are not just trying to win attention in a crowded, algorithm-fueled feed. They are creating festivals, clubs, pop-ups, runs, dinners, creative communities, and rituals that give people a reason to show up for one another, not just for a product.
Family Style
At one Family Style fest in New York last year, Nom Wah Tea Parlor (the 105-year-old Chinatown dim sum restaurant) joined forces with Forsyth Fire Escape, the Lower East Side food pop-up known for scallion-pancake burritos, and Stapleok give me fu
Together, they made a char siu scallion-pancake burrito available only at the festival.
That was the point.
The festival is billed as the intersection of cuisine and culture, bringing food and merch together that people couldn’t get on a normal weekend.
At the same event, Scarr’s Pizza released event-only gear with Awake NY; Henry’s Pizza collaborated with Japanese artist Verdy; Katz’s Delicatessen partnered with Pepsi; and Palestinian restaurant Ayat joined Kids of Immigrants. Guests could eat the limited dishes, buy the one-off merchandise, and see restaurants and brands they already followed show up in t=he same place.
Family Style started in Los Angeles in 2019, founded by Ben Shenassafar and Bobby Kim of The Hundreds with producer Miles Canares. Complex acquired it in 2024 and has since expanded it into events in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and at ComplexCon.
The festival has gotten big fast. It drew roughly 15,000 people in 2024 and 61,500 in 2025. At the 2025 New York event, organizers expected about 12,000 attendees. More than 30,000 people came.
Bobby Kim has long described the approach behind The Hundreds as “people over product.” Family Style is an extension of that idea. The limited burrito or T-shirt is what gets someone to buy a ticket. But the bigger value is being there: seeing what a city is excited about, discovering a restaurant or brand through someone else, and feeling part of the moment instead of just scrolling past it.
Flamingo Estate
At a Flamingo Estate dinner in Los Angeles, guests were asked to follow a path through a citrus orchard and rose garden. Each course appeared in a new part of the seven-acre property: passed bites in the living room, food cooked over an open fire in the orchard, lobster noodles and green-curried ribeyes in the garden pavilion, and, finally, a giant pink pavlova piled with berries back at the house.
The occasion was the launch of a Roma Heirloom Tomato candle. But the dinner was doing much more than selling a scent. As founder Richard Christiansen told the Financial Times, “The house and garden [were] purpose-built to get Alice down the rabbit hole.”
That is Flamingo Estate. The Los Angeles lifestyle brand sells olive oil, soap, candles, honey, produce, and bath products, but all of it points back to the same larger proposition: a more sensory, hands-on life shaped by gardens, food, hosting, and an awareness of where things come from.
Christiansen started the company in 2020 by sending boxes of produce from local farmers to friends during the Covid shutdown. It grew into a full line of food, fragrance, and home products, rooted in his Los Angeles property but increasingly expressed through pop-ups, collaborations, dinners, books, and, most recently, an international tour for his new book, Pleasure Principles.
The tour matters because it lets people enter the Flamingo Estate world without ever visiting the house. They are not simply buying a tomato-scented candle online; they are being invited into a point of view about pleasure, hospitality, local agriculture, and the small rituals that make daily life feel more considered.
Christiansen is unusually clear about the strategy. “If you want people to think about the environment differently, you have to show it to them differently,” he told Vogue. Flamingo Estate makes sustainability and local agriculture feel less like a lecture and more like something people want in their homes, on their tables, and in their lives.
Edge City
For four weeks this summer, more than 850 people moved into Healdsburg, a town about 90 minutes north of San Francisco. They came from more than 60 countries and worked across AI, biotech, health, urbanism, education, and the arts. There were talks, workshops, experiments, and dinners throughout the month, but a meaningful share of the programming came from residents themselves.
The gathering was called Edge Esmeralda, one of Edge City’s month-long “pop-up villages.” The easiest way to picture it is as part residency, part conference, part co-working space, and part temporary town. Its premise is that the most interesting work does not always happen when people stay inside one industry, Slack group, or city. So people do not fly in for a keynote and head home. They stay for a week or a month, work during the day, organize their own sessions, eat together, and meet collaborators outside their usual professional orbit.
At Edge Esmeralda, someone could join a Notion buildathon, participate in a wearable-health-data study, help think through a solar-powered data center, or bring their children to a creative residency designed for adults and kids. The event also served as a live prototype for Esmeralda, a proposed permanent walkable village in Northern California, with homes, a hotel, public trails, and shared community space.
Since 2023, Edge City has run nine pop-up villages that have brought together more than 12,000 participants around the world. Its next major experiment, Edge City India, is a three-week village in Goa, where founders, researchers, engineers, scientists, and creators will work from a beach-facing hub, then gather for talks, demo days, dinners, workshops, and smaller residencies on subjects ranging from women’s health and AI to local civic work.
Co-founder Timour Kosters calls the model a “micro exit”: a temporary chance to step outside everyday routines, test new ways of living and working together, and bring what works back into the world. That is what makes Edge City more than a retreat for people in tech. It is trying to create the conditions for useful collisions—between people, disciplines, and ideas—and then see what becomes possible when everyone stays long enough for those collisions to turn into something real.
