SUNDAY SCARIES: Peeping Peak Misdirection

Fall is my favorite season, because, at my core, I guess I’m a pretty basic b*tch. The leaves in New Jersey are great right now, and between living in NY and the college years in Middlebury, VT, I have had more than my share of perfect leaf peeping. Within the colors, each tells a different story: the YELLOW color is always in the leaf, under the green, the RED color is made from sunlight and leftover sugar, and ORANGE is a little of both, while the BROWN is what’s left once everything else has faded.

I’ve always been amazed at how right before they fall off, these leaves put on the most dramatic show of their lives. They’re about to fall to their end, but they look like they’re still auditioning for another year on the branch. Brands put on their own colorful show when times are tough. And this week, we’ll PEEP THE PEAK MISDIRECTION.

1. Yellow, Tesla’s “Flying Car”

Yellow is the color that was there all along and only shows once the green drains out.

On Thursday night outside Waco, Tesla finally showed the Roadster it first unveiled in 2017 and took $50,000 deposits on, then delayed in 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024 and twice more this year.

The show was surreal. It drove up a curved ramp, hung upside down, launched off the end, flipped in midair, landed on its wheels and jumped a row of Teslas, on ten cold-gas thrusters fed by 600 liters of compressed air, with nobody inside it. “Well, it worked,” Musk said, and to be fair, it did. He also said he’s “not sure it moves the needle massively from a revenue standpoint,” which is the most candid thing anyone said about a launch all month, since in the quarter that just ended Tesla delivered 8,295 cars that weren’t a Model 3 or Model Y, down from 15,933 a year earlier. Production starts in 2028.

Tesla’s VP of vehicle engineering (and President of Obvious Facts) said they had “borrowed some technology from SpaceX,” the demo happened at a SpaceX site, and Bloomberg read the whole evening as a merger hint. Ordinary people just remembered seeing a flying car.

Takeaway: Under it all, it’s looking like Tesla really is gonna be a rocket company.

(Sources: TechCrunch, October 15, 2026; Euronews, October 16, 2026; Bloomberg, October 15, 2026; Tesla Q3 2026 8-K; 24/7 Wall St, October 13, 2026)

2. Orange, Saks’ “Main Character Energy”

Orange is a yellow color with a fresh coat of red on top, partly from what it made under pressure.

Saks came out of Chapter 11 in June under a new parent company name, Exemplar Luxury Group, with its debt cut from $3.4 billion to $840 million and more than half its Saks Fifth Avenue stores gone, including the Michigan Avenue flagship in Chicago, which leaves fifteen.

Its first holiday campaign since then is called “Main Character Energy,” a group of friends on a shopping spree inside the Fifth Avenue flagship, which comes with a holiday market, a life-size Santa, dancing penguins and, starting November 23, the light show. The light show was canceled in 2024 when the money troubles piled up and came back last year, and for most New Yorkers and nearly every tourist it’s the one part of Saks they would genuinely notice if it disappeared.

Takeaway: The NYC Saks Fifth Avenue experience, the holiday windows, and the lights have always been the most Saks thing that Saks owns.

(Sources: Retail Dive, October 14, 2026)

3. Brown, Nike’s “Nothing Special”

Brown is what’s left once everything else has faded.

October 1, NIKE reported revenue down about 4% to $11.2 billion and told Wall Street the whole fiscal year will shrink by a high single digit, from a stock that has lost about 43% this year, sits roughly 80% below its 2021 high and was dropped from the S&P 100 in September after eighteen years. It seems every quarter has a cadre of similar problems with different solutions, (IMO, the diluted marketplace for classic Jordans is a very odd place to focus).

The very same day, it released the Caitlin 1, Caitlin Clark’s first signature shoe, in 5,000 stores, which CEO Elliott Hill called the largest women’s signature launch in Nike’s history. In downtown Iowa City, Nike and Dick’s built a full basketball court with bleachers and a scoreboard and parked a trailer next to it called the “Nothing Special to See Here” shop, timed to College GameDay coming to town.

As a fan, I love this support for Clark and the WNBA, but it was a bit contrived to have it on the same day. Nevertheless, both colorways sold out on Nike’s own platforms in about a day, a real win and a very good shoe, and the stock still fell almost 10% before the market opened.

Takeaway: One shoe sold out, but the rest of the tree is looking pretty brown.

(Sources: investingLive, October 1, 2026; Sneaker News, October 2, 2026; Corridor Business, October 2026; The Motley Fool, September 12, 2026)

4. Red, Wendy’s Frosty Beats

Red is the color a tree makes fresh, out of stress and sugar, and it’s always the brightest thing on the hill.

Wendy’s has had a rough year. In August it reported U.S. same-restaurant sales down 7% and traffic down 12.5%, closed 289 U.S. restaurants in six months, withdrew its outlook and cut its dividend, and its CEO said on the call, “I’m not satisfied with how effective our marketing has been.”

Then on September 23, Wendy’s and Rise Records released a six-song emo EP called Songs to Listen to in a Wendy’s Parking Lot, produced by Matt Squire, with vocals from members of Silverstein, Memphis May Fire and State Champs, and tracks like “She Said She Didn’t Want Fries,” “The Best Combo Meal on the Worst Night of My Life,” and “It’s Not a Phase, It’s a 10pc”. The logo got side-swept bangs and eyeliner.

As a creative, I love when I get jealous of others’ work, and this is the kind of idea you fight for in meetings and almost never get to make. Even just the brand admitting it has had some bad nights, “everybody’s had a night where that was the only thing that went right.” And while the creative brief probably didn’t have quotes from the earnings call in it, you could feel that level and specificity of investment in the songs.

Takeaway: Wendy’s took a bad year and turned it into some of its most inspired work.

(Sources: Wendy’s Q2 2026 release, August 7, 2026; Wendy’s Q2 earnings call, August 14, 2026; USA Today, September 23, 2026; Vice, September 23, 2026; Consequence, September 23, 2026)

This Week’s Red Thread: The Fall Show

Vermont’s tourism department surveyed its fall visitors over the last two seasons, and 61% of them couldn’t remember seeing any Vermont advertising before they came. Ninety-nine percent of them were satisfied anyway, and nearly nine in ten plan to come back. That’s either proof that the tourism campaign was a waste of money, or that those visitors were drunk on maple syrup.

People have been peeping leaves since long before there were traffic jams on I-93, Rte 100 in VT, or my favorite, NY’s I-87. It’s been a thing since at least 1884, when a Connecticut paper recommended the early train out of Hartford to see the best color along the Hudson.

In 1942, with gas being rationed for the war effort, a Massachusetts paper reported wealthy Boston people hoarding their gas for their annual drive.

And since 1959, Maine’s forest rangers have filed a weekly foliage report built on two data points, “color change” and “leaf drop,” and it’s safe to say that nobody ever needed a creator campaign on TikTok to explain either one.

In 2007 the humor columnist Jim Mullen wrote an entire piece about being “stuck behind Mr. and Mrs. Leaf Peeper for 45 minutes”. Within his diatribe about peepers, he complained that the leaves themselves were ugly up close; that they had bugs and a lot of the maples have black spots all over their leaves.

He isn’t wrong.

The leaves are all gorgeous to look at from afar and filled with imperfections up close.

But then again, so are most brands when you look carefully.

— NB