If you’ve walked past a Coach store lately, or seen one too many bag charms on TikTok, you’ve probably noticed something: Coach feels different. A few years ago it was the brand your mom bought at the outlet mall. Now it’s showing up on Gen Z wishlists next to actual luxury houses. That’s not an accident, and it’s not a lucky viral moment either. It’s deliberate, intentional crafting of the brand.

The problem: Coach became a brand for everyone

Coach’s issue was never the products. The leather goods were solid and always had been. The issue was how people saw the brand. Years of aggressive discounting, outlet stores everywhere, and selling to basically anyone had made Coach feel accessible instead of aspirational. You could buy it, sure, but did you actually want to? CEO Todd Kahn put it plainly: Coach had become “a brand for everyone,” which meant it stopped being a brand for anyone in particular.

So the real question was: how do you become desirable again without throwing away the quality and heritage that built you in the first place?

Turns out the answer wasn’t a new bag or a flashy campaign. It was changing how people experienced the brand altogether.

Aesthetics isn’t just “looking good”

People hear “aesthetics” and think visuals.

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But a brand world is much bigger than that.

It is something a brand builds over time, through the choices it makes again and again, until there is a distinct sense of what belongs to it. Eventually, you can recognise the brand through a particular colour, texture, room, photograph or object before you have even seen the logo.

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Here is a small experiment. Picture a Ralph Lauren store in your head. Now remove the logo. No name above the door, no embroidered pony anywhere in sight.

Chances are you would still know where you were. The dark wood, the worn leather, the brass, the tartan, the equestrian references. Lighting that leans warm rather than bright. A room that feels like it has existed for decades, even when it hasn’t. There’s a polish to it, but nothing feels too precious to actually sit on.

Try that same experiment with most other brands and it gets much harder. Remove the logo and what’s left often feels interchangeable with a dozen competitors. Ralph Lauren is one of the few companies whose identity survives well beyond its graphic assets.

We usually call this strong branding. There is a more useful way to look at it. Ralph Lauren has spent almost sixty years building taste.

At BOA, we think of a company’s taste as something we come to recognise through the aesthetic choices it makes, not something we experience directly. Nobody walks into a store and encounters “taste” itself. What you encounter is the material of a chair, the colour on the wall, the cut of a jacket, the way a table is set. Those are aesthetic choices. When enough of them are made with the same quality of judgment, over and over, a pattern starts to show up. We start to understand what the company finds elegant, what it thinks is worth keeping, what references it reaches for. That pattern is what we begin to recognise as its taste. The choices are what we experience. The accumulation of those choices is what reveals the taste. And all of it, together, shapes our perception of the business.

Ralph Lauren is a useful company to study because that pattern has been building for almost six decades, one decision at a time, rather than arriving through a single great campaign or a single beautiful store. So the more interesting question isn’t whether Ralph Lauren has good taste. It’s how that taste actually got built.

Where did it come from?

Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx in 1939. There were no sprawling estates or polo fields waiting outside his childhood home. Much of that world reached him first through imagination, particularly through the movies. He watched actors like Cary Grant and Gary Cooper and absorbed the American West, sports, cars and clothes as different versions of what a desirable life could look like.

It would be easy to assume that a vision like Ralph Lauren’s comes from proximity, that you have to grow up inside a particular world to understand it well enough to recreate it. His story complicates that idea. Lauren developed an eye for a world he had largely experienced from the outside. He observed it, imagined himself within it and, importantly, decided which parts of it were worth carrying forward.

That last part matters because exposure alone does not create a distinctive point of view. The real skill is in the editing.

Lauren never reproduced his references exactly. Ralph Lauren is not historically accurate English aristocracy, authentic cowboy dress or Ivy League style preserved untouched. He borrowed from all of them, romanticising some elements, exaggerating others and leaving out what did not fit. More importantly, he put together references that did not obviously belong to the same person: a tuxedo with denim, English tailoring alongside the American West, country-club polish beside the ruggedness of ranch life.

His judgment becomes visible in those decisions: what he kept, what he rejected and what he believed could sit together. Perhaps that is why the Ralph Lauren world rarely feels as though it is trying to invent something entirely new. It feels more like a world assembled from things we already recognise, edited so convincingly that they begin to feel as though they have always belonged together.

That judgment began to take physical form when Lauren launched Polo in 1967 with wide, handmade neckties at a time when narrow ties were fashionable. He later described what he was selling in terms far bigger than neckwear: a “level of taste”, a “total feeling”. It is tempting to read that quote backwards and assume the Ralph Lauren universe already existed, fully formed, in his head. It did not. He had the references and a vision for how they could come together, but it was through aesthetic choices that the rest of us began to see it. The width of a tie was one of those choices. So was the fabric. Every decision that followed gave the world a little more evidence of what Ralph Lauren’s taste was becoming.

How did one man’s eye become an entire company’s?

A founder can have exceptional taste. A global corporation can’t rely on that founder standing over every single decision forever. Ralph Lauren now operates across countries, categories, and price points, with thousands of people designing clothes, shooting campaigns, and building stores that Lauren himself never personally touches. And yet much of it still feels coherent.

The reason is that aesthetic choices do something else once they pile up over enough years: they create precedent. The company now has an enormous archive of its own judgment, decades of campaigns showing how it photographs a family, decades of interiors showing which woods and finishes belong in its world, collections showing how it handles colour. Someone joining the company today isn’t starting from a blank page. There’s a long history to measure a new idea against. Does this feel too polished? Too contemporary? Too cold? That’s what it looks like when taste becomes institutionalised. Not because the taste itself produces new work, but because the organisation now has a clear sense of what belongs and what doesn’t.

What does Ralph Lauren’s taste actually look like?

Calling Ralph Lauren “preppy” is convenient, but incomplete. There are navy blazers and Oxford shirts, but also the American West, black tie, English country houses and old Manhattan. These worlds look different, yet still feel like Ralph Lauren because the taste is not one particular aesthetic. It is in how the company selects, edits and combines them.

Certain preferences appear repeatedly. Ralph Lauren gravitates towards things with history and character: worn leather, dark wood, layered rooms and clothes that feel timeless rather than new. Heritage is reinterpreted rather than reproduced. Tartan moves from clothing into interiors. Menswear fabrics become upholstery. Western references sit alongside traditional tailoring.

Ralph Lauren Home made this particularly clear when it launched in 1983. Its first collections were organised around lifestyles such as Thoroughbred, New England, Jamaica and Log Cabin. They looked different, but each represented Ralph Lauren’s interpretation of a particular way of living.

Ralph Lauren does not have one aesthetic. It has a recognisable way of choosing and interpreting aesthetics. That is its taste.

A brand you can physically walk into

A campaign only has to hold a fantasy together for one frame. A store has to make it believable when you step inside.

Ralph Lauren understood this early. When Polo got its own space inside Bloomingdale’s in 1970, Lauren was already involved in details like the wood panelling. By the time the Rhinelander Mansion became its Madison Avenue flagship in 1986, the store was no longer simply somewhere to buy clothes. The architecture, lighting and furniture made entering Ralph Lauren feel like entering someone’s private world. As Lauren put it, “I’m not just selling clothes. I’m selling a world, a notion of style.” The store made that world physical.

The Polo Bar takes the same thinking into hospitality. Dark wood, leather banquettes, brass and equestrian details make a restaurant opened in 2015 feel as though it has been there for decades. Ralph’s Coffee offers a more accessible entry point. You may never buy a Purple Label suit, but you can buy a coffee and briefly participate in the same world.

That may be one of Ralph Lauren’s smartest aesthetic choices: it built an aspirational world, then gave people different ways to enter it.

The dreams business, and what happens when the choices stop supporting it

CEO Patrice Louvet has said the company once asked itself a simple question: what business are we actually in? The answer wasn’t apparel. It was dreams. The company’s history makes the case. The restaurants, furniture, coffee shops, vintage cars and equestrian imagery make little sense if the product is simply a shirt. They make perfect sense if Ralph Lauren is selling a version of the American dream, pieced together from the country club, the ranch, the summer house and Manhattan after dark.

But a dream is easy to dilute. By the mid-2010s, Ralph Lauren had expanded heavily into department stores and discount channels, creating encounters that increasingly clashed with the world it had spent decades building. The same Polo shirt feels different in a carefully designed flagship than it does on a discount rack. The product hasn’t changed. The context has, and context shapes perception.

When Louvet became CEO in 2017, pulling back from weaker distribution and reducing discounting meant sacrificing some short-term sales. But it also protected something more valuable: the perception Ralph Lauren had spent decades building.

What has all of this actually earned the business?

A few concrete things. It creates distinctiveness, since Ralph Lauren doesn’t own navy sweaters or blazers, it owns a particular way of putting them into context. It supports premium pricing, because a customer isn’t just buying fabric and stitching, they’re buying proximity to a world that took decades to build. It makes expansion believable rather than opportunistic, a restaurant from most fashion companies reads as a strange detour, a Ralph Lauren restaurant somehow reads as obvious. And it buys the company continuity. Silhouettes change, campaigns change, but there’s a large archive of established judgment against which every new choice gets measured, which means the company is rarely starting from zero.

Ralph Lauren’s taste wasn’t created by its logo, or by one campaign, or by the decision to panel a single store in mahogany. It was built from thousands of smaller choices made across almost sixty years: the width of a tie, the colour of a shirt, the leather on a chair, the patina allowed onto a piece of wood, the decision to put a coffee shop inside the same universe as a mansion on Madison Avenue. People encountered those choices one at a time. Enough of them shared the same underlying judgment that something larger eventually became visible.

That’s a taste. And it’s what earned Ralph Lauren a perception few competitors can touch: aspirational, distinctly American, refined without being unreachable, and recognisable well before you ever see the name.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

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Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic choices build a business’s taste, shape how it is experienced, influence perception, and create commercial value.

Often, that’s true. It’s also only half the story.

Marketing gets the credit because it’s the part we can see. The adverts, the influencer posts, the billboards. Branding works quietly in the background, doing its job long before a campaign launches and long after it ends. That’s exactly why people mix the two up. We experience them at the same time, so we assume they’re the same thing.

They’re not.

Branding is who you are. Marketing is how you get noticed. Branding is the long-term work of deciding what a business stands for and why anyone should care. Marketing is the execution that gets people through the door. One builds meaning. The other builds attention. Knowing the difference is what separates brands that are simply seen from brands that are remembered.

What marketing actually does

Marketing exists to create awareness and demand. Its job is to answer one question: how do we get people to notice us?

A paid ad, an email campaign, an influencer deal, a product launch, they all serve the same purpose: moving people toward action. Clicks, sign-ups, sales.

Marketing also changes constantly, by design. Campaigns launch and wrap up. Promotions come and go. Messaging shifts with trends and new products. That’s part of why it’s measurable, its wins show up quickly, in clicks and conversions and revenue.

But attention isn’t preference. Someone can click your ad or walk into your store because the marketing worked. Whether they come back is a completely different question, and marketing alone can’t answer it.

What branding actually does

If marketing tells people how to find you, branding tells them why they should stay.

Branding is your purpose, your values, your position in the market, the promise you make and keep. It shapes how people feel about your business before they’ve bought anything, and whether they’ll buy again. It shows up in your product, your packaging, your customer service, the way your website talks to people. Your logo and colours are part of it, but they’re really just its outfit, not the person wearing it.

Unlike marketing, branding is built to last. It’s the thing that doesn’t change even when the campaigns do, the north star that guides decisions over years rather than weeks.

And its real payoff isn’t awareness. It’s trust. Get branding right for long enough and you earn brand equity: customers who’ll pay more, recommend you unprompted, and pick you over a cheaper option because they actually believe in what you represent.

This is where aesthetics comes in, and it’s more than paint on the walls.

Every brand communicates something, whether it means to or not. The question was never whether customers are forming impressions. It’s how those impressions get shaped. A brand’s aesthetic is its language, the way it tells you its story, its values, its personality, and what to expect from it.

It helps to go back to what “aesthetics” originally meant. Long before it became shorthand for design trends and curated Instagram grids, aesthetics was the study of sensory perception, how we experience and interpret the world through our senses. It was about feeling before it was ever about looking good.

The same is true for brands. Customers can’t understand who you are just because you say so in a mission statement. They understand you through what they see, touch, hear, and experience: the feel of the product, the mood of the store, the weight of the packaging, the tone of an email. Every one of those details is doing the talking.

Which means aesthetics isn’t decoration you add once the “real” strategy is done. It’s how branding becomes something people can actually feel. Long before a customer can put their opinion of you into words, they’ve already started forming one.

Why strong branding makes marketing work harder

The best campaigns rarely succeed on their own merit. They succeed because the brand behind them already has a clear identity and an emotional promise it’s kept for years.

Take Apple. Its marketing introduces new products, but its branding has spent decades quietly building something more valuable: trust. Long before anyone watches a keynote, they already expect Apple products to be simple, intuitive, well made. So when a campaign like “Relax, it’s iPhone” runs, it isn’t reinventing anything. It’s just reminding you of a promise you already believed. The marketing lands because the branding did the real work first.

Nike works the same way, just louder. Its campaigns change constantly, new athletes, new stories, new shoes, but the feeling never does. Whether it’s an Olympic spot or a running shoe launch, Nike keeps circling back to the same belief: ambition and perseverance win. The marketing evolves. The brand doesn’t move an inch.

Why businesses get this backwards

One of the most common mistakes a business can make is treating a branding problem like a marketing problem.

Sales dip, so they spend more on ads. Engagement drops, so they post more often. Traffic slows, so they launch another campaign. These moves can produce a short-term bump, but they rarely fix what’s actually wrong.

Marketing can get someone to click, visit, or walk in. It can’t make them trust you. It can’t smooth over an inconsistent experience, a confusing position in the market, or a product that undersells its own promise. If anything, marketing makes the problem worse faster: the more people your campaigns reach, the more people notice the gap between what you promised and what you delivered.

Without a strong brand underneath it, better marketing just means more people finding out you’re inconsistent, faster.

This is why branding has to come before marketing scales up, not the other way around. Branding lays the foundation: who you are, what you stand for, why anyone should believe you. Marketing’s job is just to carry that message out into the world. Get the order wrong, and no amount of ad spend will fix it.

Apple is proof of what it looks like when the order is right. The brand hasn’t shifted in decades: simplicity, craft, the belief that good design should feel effortless. The marketing around it changes every cycle, new products, new features, new campaigns, but it’s always in service of that same idea. That’s why an Apple ad never needs to explain itself to feel unmistakably Apple.

Marketing might be how people find you. Branding is the reason they stay, come back, and tell their friends. Get both working together, and you’re not just chasing attention anymore. You’re building something people choose again and again, without needing to be convinced twice.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

—

Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic decisions shape perception, influence behaviour, and create business value.

Most businesses compete by building better products, adding more features, or lowering their prices. While those things matter, they are rarely what creates lasting loyalty. People remember how a brand made them feel long after they have forgotten the specifications of a product or the details of a marketing campaign. That feeling is what creates emotional connection, and it is one of the few competitive advantages that cannot easily be copied.

When customers feel emotionally connected to a brand, their relationship with it changes. They are more likely to return, recommend it to others, and remain loyal even when competitors offer similar products. They stop seeing the brand as simply another business and begin to see it as something that reflects their values, aspirations, or identity. In a crowded market where products become increasingly interchangeable, that kind of connection is often what separates brands that are remembered from those that are easily replaced.

Building that connection starts with a story. Not a story invented by a marketing team because it sounds compelling, but one rooted in something genuine: a founder’s belief, a problem worth solving, or an experience that inspired the business to exist in the first place. That story gives people something to connect with because it explains not only what the company does, but why it exists.

However, a story only becomes meaningful when it is told consistently through every interaction people have with the brand. Aesthetics is how that story is told. It is found in the product, the packaging, the website, the store environment, the customer service, the tone of voice, and every interaction a customer has with the brand. Each touchpoint should reinforce the same idea. When customers repeatedly experience the same story, they begin to trust it, and that trust develops into emotional connection.

How Barbie Rebuilt Emotional Connection

When Ruth Handler created Barbie, she was not simply making another doll. She noticed that most dolls only allowed girls to imagine one future: motherhood. She wanted girls to imagine many futures. Barbie was created to give girls permission to imagine themselves as doctors, astronauts, artists, presidents, and anything else they wanted to become. The doll itself was never the real story. The story was possibility.

For decades, that idea created a powerful emotional connection with generations of children and parents. But over time, the brand drifted away from its origins. The conversation became more about the doll than what the doll represented, and the emotional connection that had once made Barbie so powerful began to weaken.

Mattel’s comeback did not come from inventing a new story. It came from returning to the one Ruth Handler had created from the very beginning. The company introduced dolls with a wider range of body types, skin tones, abilities, and careers, while initiatives like the Dream Gap Project reinforced its commitment to helping girls imagine their potential. More importantly, the story was reflected across the brand. Its products, campaigns, partnerships, and initiatives all reinforced the same message, allowing customers to experience the idea of possibility wherever they encountered Barbie.

Crocs Invited Customers Into the Story

Crocs built emotional connection in a different way. Rather than relying on its founder story, it built a brand around the belief that people should feel comfortable expressing themselves without worrying about fitting in. Instead of distancing itself from criticism that the shoes were unconventional or unattractive, Crocs embraced what made it different and encouraged customers to do the same.

Its “Come As You Are” platform celebrated individuality, but the story did not stop with advertising. Jibbitz charms transformed the shoes into something customers could personalise, allowing every pair to reflect the personality of the person wearing them. Customers were no longer simply buying footwear; they were actively participating in the brand’s story by making it their own. That sense of ownership made the relationship feel personal, and personal experiences create far stronger emotional connections than marketing messages ever could.

Building Emotional Connection With Your Own Brand

If you want customers to feel emotionally connected to your brand, start by asking yourself one simple question: What do I want to be known for?

The answer should not begin with your product or its features. It should begin with your story. Why did you start the business? What problem were you trying to solve? What belief sits at the heart of your brand?

More often than not, the origin of your business is where your audience lives too. The frustration that inspired you to create the business may be the same frustration your customers are experiencing today. When people recognise themselves in your story, they feel understood, and that is where emotional connection begins.

Once your story is clear, your responsibility is to tell it consistently. Every touchpoint should reinforce the same idea. Your product should express it. Your website should express it. Your packaging, customer service, social media, and every interaction with your brand should leave people with the same understanding of who you are and what you stand for.

Most importantly, make sure the story is authentic. Customers can tell the difference between a story that has been created for marketing purposes and one that comes from genuine conviction. The strongest brands do not build emotional connection by chasing trends or constantly reinventing themselves. They build it by staying true to what made them meaningful in the first place and making sure every customer experiences that story, again and again.

That is how emotional connection is built. And that is how brands become unforgettable.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

—

Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic decisions shape perception, influence behaviour, and create business value.

Most people hear the word aesthetics and think of how something looks. A nice logo, a good color palette, maybe a well lit store.

At The Business of Aesthetics, we mean something bigger. Aesthetics is the study of how people experience the world through their senses, and the meaning they attach to that experience.

In business, that covers a lot more ground than a mood board. A product, an app, a queue, a price tag, even how long you wait for your coffee. All of it shapes how a brand feels before you have consciously decided anything about it.

Blank Street is a useful brand to test that idea on, because nothing about its rise looks accidental once you slow down and look at it.

It is not that the coffee is unusually good or the branding unusually pretty. It is that almost every decision, from the size of its stores to what is on the menu, was built around how one generation actually wants to move through a day.

It Didn’t Build Another Coffee Shop

For years, coffee chains sold the idea of the café as a destination. Find a seat, open your laptop, stay for three hours, treat the place like a second office. That was the whole “third place” pitch.

Blank Street quietly opted out of that. Its stores are small, often closer to a kiosk than a café, built for people who want to order, grab their drink, and keep moving. On paper that reads as an operations decision, the kind of thing a McKinsey deck would call “footprint efficiency.”

But it is also an aesthetic decision, whether or not anyone at the company would put it that way. Gen Z mostly doesn’t treat coffee shops as a destination. Coffee shows up between meetings, after a workout, on the walk to the train.

Blank Street built an experience that fits into that rhythm instead of asking people to rearrange their day around it. The unspoken message is simple: your time is worth something, and we’re not going to waste it.

The Cup Became Part of the Outfit

Somewhere in the last decade, products stopped existing on their own. They started existing as part of identity.

A coffee cup is no longer just something you drink out of. For a lot of people it’s part of the morning routine, part of what they’re wearing, occasionally part of what they post.

Brands are not only competing on taste anymore. They are competing on what it feels like to be seen holding the thing.

Blank Street’s cups, its color, its restrained typography, none of it looks like it was designed specifically for Instagram, and that’s precisely why it works there. It slots into the visual language people already use without announcing itself.

The cup stops being packaging and starts acting like a small, portable signal: this person has their life together, or at least their coffee order.

Matcha Stopped Being a Menu Item

Coffee culture has traditionally worshipped espresso. Craft, technique, the perfect shot. Gen Z has been drifting toward something different, a version of wellness that doesn’t ask you to give up indulgence to get it.

Matcha is where that shows up.

Instead of treating it as a footnote next to the flat whites, Blank Street built entire drinks around it, Blueberry Matcha and White Chocolate Matcha among them. These are not just flavor experiments.

Ordering one has become shorthand for a certain kind of self-care, a softer alternative to the grind-culture coffee run. Blank Street was riding a wave here rather than starting one, plenty of cafés were already leaning into matcha, but it committed to the drink harder and louder than most of its competitors, and built its whole visual identity around it.

Affordable Luxury, Minus the Guilt

Luxury used to mean exclusivity and a price tag that kept people out. That is not really how younger consumers think about it anymore. This is the generation that made “dupe culture” mainstream, hunting for things that deliver the feeling of premium without the premium invoice.

Blank Street sits right in that gap. It feels more considered than a standard high street coffee chain, but nowhere near as intimidating as an independent specialty café where the menu can feel like it’s testing you.

The effect is that Blank Street quietly democratizes the feeling of premium. Nobody walks out feeling like they settled. They feel like they found a smarter way in.

Automation Freed Up the Humans, Not Replaced Them

Most companies invest in automation to cut labor costs, and the experience usually gets colder as a result. Blank Street took a different angle. It leaned into automated espresso machines so that baristas were not stuck repeating the same forty seconds of steam and pour, order after order.

That freed-up time didn’t disappear. It went into greeting people, remembering names, the small human moments that automation usually erases.

Technology handled the repetition. People handled the relationship. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it’s the difference between automation that feels like it’s replacing you and automation that just gives you room to actually talk to the person in front of you.

The App Isn’t a Bolt-On

For most food brands, the app exists purely to move transactions along. Blank Street’s does more legwork than that.

Its subscription model, Blank Street Regulars, charges a flat weekly fee (currently somewhere between nine and twenty two dollars depending on the plan) for a set number of drinks, redeemable a few times a day. It turns a purchase you’d normally think about each time into something closer to a standing appointment.

That’s a small but clever aesthetic move in itself. The transaction disappears and a membership takes its place. You’re not buying coffee anymore, technically you’re a Regular, and the label does some quiet psychological work every time you open the app.

The Sum of Small Moments

That distinction is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most companies spend years trying to improve the product itself. Blank Street spent its energy on the experience wrapped around the product.

The coffee matters, obviously. But so does being recognized by name. So does an app that doesn’t make you think. So does a small, calm space that doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard. So does a cup that looks right in your hand on the way into work.

None of these on their own would build a brand. Stacked together, they build a habit people are happy to repeat.

Blank Street didn’t get here through one great campaign or one viral drink, even if the matcha did most of the heavy lifting online. It got here by treating aesthetics as something much wider than color and logo, and applying that thinking to nearly every decision it made.

The speed of service, the tone of the app, the symbolism of a specific shade of green matcha, the price point that lets you feel like you’re in on something. Every one of those choices says something about the brand, and about the person choosing it.

Image Credits: All images courtesy of Blank Street Coffee via Instagram.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

—

Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic decisions shape perception, influence behaviour, and create business value.

Understanding the Customer Comes First

One of the things I’ve found interesting over the years is how often people position branding and product as though they’re competing priorities. You’ll hear someone say, “Don’t spend too much time thinking about branding. Just build a great product.” Someone else will argue the opposite, insisting that the right marketing and beautiful branding can sell almost anything. I’ve never been persuaded by either argument because, in my experience, the most successful businesses understand that the two are inseparable.

Perhaps that’s because I came into branding through product management. Before I spent my time thinking about aesthetics, positioning, and perception, I spent years thinking about customers. My job wasn’t simply to decide what features to build next; it was to understand why customers behaved the way they did in the first place.

I wanted to know what frustrated them, what slowed them down, and what they wished existed. Some of the most valuable work I did rarely happened in meetings. It happened while reading Reddit discussions, scrolling through customer reviews, comparing competitor feedback, and trying to identify patterns in what people were saying.

What fascinated me wasn’t necessarily the feature requests. Customers are not always the best people to tell you what to build. What they are exceptionally good at is describing how a product makes them feel. They talk about moments of frustration, confusion, delight, relief, or disappointment. They tell you where they almost gave up, what they loved, and what they never want to experience again.

Somewhere inside those conversations are the problems worth solving.

I think that’s what has made product management so rewarding for me. At its best, it’s an exercise in empathy. You’re constantly asking yourself whether you’ve understood the customer well enough to build something that genuinely improves their life. A feature isn’t successful because it’s technically clever; it’s successful because someone finishes using it and thinks, finally, someone gets it.

Over time, I realised that this customer-first mindset had also shaped the way I think about branding.

Beauty Can Open the Door, But It Can’t Keep It Open

Emily Heyward, co-founder of Red Antler, expresses this brilliantly in her book Obsessed. She writes, “If you have an appealing aesthetic, and smart copywriting, that may be enough to get people’s attention and get them to try something. But if they start to dig in and there’s nothing underneath, if your product doesn’t deliver on your promise, they aren’t going to come back for more, and they certainly aren’t going to be your champions.”

I remember reading that passage and thinking that it perfectly described the relationship between branding and product. Branding can spark curiosity. It can make someone pause while they’re scrolling, pick your product off a shelf, or click through to your website. But branding can only open the door. Whether people choose to stay depends entirely on what they experience next.

That feels even more relevant today than it did a decade ago because consumers have become remarkably good researchers. A beautiful website or carefully curated social media feed is rarely enough to convince someone to buy.

Before making a purchase, many people will read reviews, search Reddit for honest opinions, watch comparison videos on YouTube, or type the product name into TikTok to see what real customers have to say. Research from the Pew Research Center found that a majority of U.S. TikTok users use the platform to discover product reviews and recommendations, reflecting how naturally consumers now seek validation before committing to a purchase. Information is more accessible than it has ever been, and that makes it increasingly difficult for businesses to rely on branding alone.

Ironically, I don’t think this makes branding less important. If anything, it makes branding more important than ever. The difference is that branding can no longer be expected to compensate for a weak product. Instead, its role is to communicate the value of a genuinely good one.

A well-crafted brand creates enough resonance for someone to say, “This looks like it’s for me.” A well-crafted product is what makes them say, “I’m glad I bought it.”

The Businesses That Endure Need Both

I’ve often thought about how many exceptional products never become successful simply because they struggle to communicate their value. Founders sometimes assume that usefulness speaks for itself, but it rarely does. Customers can’t appreciate a solution they never discover, and they can’t understand a product whose value hasn’t been communicated clearly. Utility without communication often goes unnoticed, just as beauty without substance quickly loses credibility.

That’s why I find it difficult to separate branding from product development. To me, they’re simply different expressions of the same philosophy. Product development is the discipline of solving meaningful problems. Branding is the discipline of helping people recognise that you’ve solved them.

One creates value; the other makes that value visible.

The businesses that endure tend to understand this instinctively. They don’t use beautiful branding to disguise mediocre products, nor do they assume that building a great product is enough on its own. Instead, they see branding and product as reinforcing one another. The brand creates an expectation, and the product fulfils it. When those two things remain aligned over time, trust begins to form.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never understood the debate between beauty and utility. They were never rivals in the first place. Beauty without utility eventually disappoints. Utility without beauty often goes unnoticed. The businesses we remember are usually the ones that understand they need both—not because beauty can compensate for a poor product, but because it gives a remarkable product the opportunity to be discovered in the first place.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

—

Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic decisions shape perception, influence behaviour, and create business value.

They want customers to see their business as trustworthy, premium, innovative, approachable, or dependable. They have a clear vision of how they want people to talk about the company after they’ve left. What I’ve realised, though, is that far fewer founders spend the same amount of time thinking about how those perceptions are actually formed.

Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” I think that’s true. But it also raises another question: why do people say those things in the first place?

It isn’t because they’ve read your mission statement or spent time studying your brand guidelines. It’s because they’ve experienced your business. Every interaction gives them something to interpret, and over time those interactions become an impression. That impression eventually becomes your reputation.

This is why I’ve come to believe that every business has an aesthetic, whether it intended to create one or not.

The word aesthetic often sends our minds in the wrong direction. We think about logos, colour palettes, typography, beautiful interiors, or carefully curated Instagram feeds. Those things certainly contribute to an aesthetic, but they don’t define it. An aesthetic is much broader than visual identity. It’s the overall feeling people are left with after experiencing your business. It’s the atmosphere you create, the rhythm of your service, the way your team communicates, the confidence your processes inspire, and the consistency with which every part of the business reinforces the same impression.

One of the clearest examples of this is The Ritz-Carlton.

People don’t remember a stay at The Ritz-Carlton simply because the rooms are comfortable. What they remember is how the experience made them feel. From the moment you arrive, there’s a sense that everything has been thought through. You’re welcomed warmly before you’ve had a chance to reach reception. The lobby feels calm rather than hurried. Conversations are unhurried, staff move with quiet confidence, and every interaction seems to communicate the same message: you are being cared for.

Now compare that with a typical roadside hotel. It may be perfectly clean, the bed may be comfortable, and the staff may be polite. Yet the experience feels entirely different. The television in the lobby is playing the morning news, the receptionist is checking someone in while answering the phone, breakfast is served in a room that doubles as a meeting space, and the overall experience is designed to help you get in, sleep, and leave.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The hotel is delivering exactly what many of its guests are looking for.

What is interesting, however, is that both hotels provide essentially the same service, yet they create completely different perceptions. One has intentionally designed an experience that communicates care, refinement, and calm. The other has primarily designed for efficiency and practicality. Neither approach is inherently better, but both businesses have an aesthetic because both leave customers with a distinct impression.

The same principle applies far beyond hospitality.

I’ve noticed that many businesses struggle not because they lack ambition, but because there is a disconnect between the brand the founder imagines and the one customers actually experience. A founder may want the business to feel premium, but the onboarding process feels rushed. They may want to be known for exceptional service, yet emails go unanswered for days. They may talk about craftsmanship and attention to detail, while customers encounter inconsistent communication at every stage of their journey.

None of these moments seems particularly significant when viewed in isolation. Together, however, they shape the story customers tell themselves about your business.

This is why I don’t think brand experience should be treated as something separate from branding. Brand experience is branding.

Every email, every customer conversation, every invoice, every delivery, every support interaction, every meeting, every delay, every promise kept, and every promise broken contributes to how people perceive your business. Customers don’t separate these moments into different departments. They experience them as one continuous relationship with your brand.

That’s where intentionality becomes so important.

Businesses like The Ritz-Carlton don’t create memorable experiences by accident. They understand what they want customers to feel, and then they design hundreds of small decisions around that outcome. How guests are greeted. How problems are resolved. How staff communicate. How spaces are arranged. How long interactions should take. Individually, these decisions may seem ordinary. Collectively, they become the experience people remember.

Many smaller businesses, on the other hand, allow these decisions to emerge over time. One person writes the emails. Another designs the website. Someone else decides how customer complaints should be handled. New systems are added whenever they become necessary. Nothing is intentionally inconsistent, but neither is it intentionally connected. The result is that customers experience a business that feels fragmented, even when the product itself is excellent.

This is why I think every founder should ask a question that rarely appears in business plans:

What should it feel like to experience our business?

Not just what should people buy.

Not just what should they think.

But what should they feel from the first interaction to the last?

The answer to that question influences far more than your visual identity. It shapes how you hire, how you communicate, how you design your processes, how you recover from mistakes, how you welcome customers, and ultimately how people remember you long after the transaction is over.

Perhaps that’s what aesthetics really is.

It isn’t the art of making a business look beautiful.

It’s the discipline of making a business feel intentional.

Because whether you’ve designed it or not, people are already forming an impression. They are already deciding what your business stands for. They are already telling a story about what it feels like to deal with you.

The only question is whether that’s the story you intended them to tell.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

—

Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic decisions shape perception, influence behaviour, and create business value.

Every summer, something interesting happens.

As luxury brands compete for attention through campaigns, collaborations, and resort collections, one brand seems perfectly at home: Jacquemus.

The images arrive like clockwork: sun-drenched landscapes, linen dresses catching the breeze, golden wheat fields, Mediterranean coastlines, limestone cliffs, and impossibly blue skies. It feels less like the launch of a fashion collection and more like the arrival of summer itself.

This year was no different. Rather than showing on the traditional fashion calendar, Simon Porte Jacquemus unveiled his latest collection, Le Bonheur, on the island of Corsica, once again choosing the height of summer over the industry’s conventional schedule.

At first glance, it looks like a creative decision. In reality, it’s a branding strategy. Jacquemus isn’t simply designing clothes. He’s designing a season.

Fashion’s calendar wasn’t built for customers.

For decades, luxury fashion has followed a rigid schedule. Autumn/Winter collections are shown in February and March, while Spring/Summer collections appear in September.

The reason has never been artistic. It was logistical. Retail buyers needed time to attend shows, place wholesale orders, manufacturers needed months to produce garments, and department stores needed inventory before the season began. The calendar existed to make the supply chain work, not to maximise customer desire.

But that system matters less today than it once did. Brands with strong direct-to-consumer businesses have more freedom to decide when they launch collections, and Jacquemus has taken full advantage of that freedom.

Instead of asking, “When does the industry expect us to show?” he asks something much more powerful: “When will this collection feel most alive?”

Summer isn’t just a season. It’s the brand.

Every great brand owns a particular feeling. Apple feels like optimism and possibility. Hermès feels like craftsmanship and permanence. Tiffany feels like celebration.

Jacquemus owns something remarkably specific: Mediterranean summers. Not just visually, but emotionally. His collections evoke long lunches, warm evenings, slow mornings, salt in the air, linen against sun-kissed skin, holidays without schedules, and a kind of effortless luxury that feels both aspirational and attainable.

That consistency matters because people rarely remember products in isolation. They remember the feeling surrounding them. Over time, Jacquemus hasn’t simply become associated with summer. He’s become part of how many people imagine it.

And that’s where the competitive advantage lies. A competitor can replicate the silhouette of a Jacquemus dress or borrow elements of its visual language. What they can’t easily copy is years of consistent association with a feeling. Summer doesn’t just remind people of Jacquemus anymore. Jacquemus helps define what an aspirational European summer looks and feels like. That kind of mental ownership isn’t built in a single campaign. It is built through years of consistency.

The runway is no longer just a runway.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Jacquemus is that the location is never merely a backdrop. It completes the collection.

A yellow dress shown inside a convention centre is simply a yellow dress. That same dress walking through golden limestone cliffs under the Mediterranean sun tells an entirely different story.

The landscape becomes part of the product. The weather becomes part of the styling. The light becomes part of the photography. The collection doesn’t end with the garment. It extends into the environment.

That’s why people often remember the location long after they’ve forgotten individual looks. The show itself becomes an aesthetic object.

He isn’t optimising logistics. He’s optimising desire.

Traditional fashion calendars optimise operational efficiency. Jacquemus optimises emotional resonance.

Showing a summer collection during summer may seem obvious. Yet for decades, the industry couldn’t operate that way. Now, brands with greater control over distribution can align product launches with the emotional moment customers actually want them.

That alignment changes everything. Consumers aren’t merely seeing clothes. They’re seeing clothes exactly when they’re dreaming about wearing them. The environment, the season, and the customer’s mindset all reinforce one another. That’s far more persuasive than a perfectly planned production schedule.

Time is an aesthetic asset.

When we think about aesthetics, we usually think about colour, typography, photography, architecture or packaging. But there’s another design decision brands often overlook: timing.

Some of the world’s strongest brands don’t simply own visual identities. They own moments.

Apple has conditioned the world to expect something new every September. Spotify Wrapped has transformed early December into a yearly cultural event. Coca-Cola has spent decades making Christmas feel incomplete without its advertising.

Jacquemus is doing something similar. He’s quietly making European summer feel like his territory. That’s much harder to copy than a logo.

The business value of owning a season

When a brand consistently appears at the same emotional moment every year, several things happen. Expectation builds naturally. Customers begin anticipating its arrival. Marketing feels less interruptive because it aligns with what people are already thinking about. The brand becomes easier to remember because it occupies a distinct place in consumers’ mental calendars.

Most importantly, competitors can’t easily replicate that position. Anyone can launch a summer campaign. It’s much harder to become synonymous with summer itself.

That’s the difference between participating in a season and owning one.

Final thought

The biggest lesson from Jacquemus isn’t that brands should abandon the traditional fashion calendar. It’s that aesthetics extend beyond what customers see. They include when customers experience something.

The strongest brands understand that timing isn’t just an operational decision. It’s an aesthetic one.

Because sometimes, the most powerful design choice isn’t the colour of the collection.

It’s the moment you choose to reveal it.

Thank you for reading. Every essay is an invitation to look a little closer at the decisions that shape how brands are experienced. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time, stay curious.

Ihemjiere

—

Business of Aesthetics explores how aesthetic decisions shape perception, influence behaviour, and create business value.

If it looks beautiful, I want it.

It’s a tendency I’ve had for as long as I can remember. As a child, I would go grocery shopping with my dad and always reach for the products with the most appealing packaging, the ones with colours, shapes, and designs that stood out from everything else on the shelf. My dad would shake his head every time. “It’s just marketing,” he would say. Or sometimes: “It’s just the packaging.” His favourite warning was always the same: all that glitters is not gold.

But even then, I found myself wondering something. If it wasn’t special, why did it look special? Why was it glittering in the first place?

Not much has changed. I still find myself drawn to beautiful brands, and my husband jokes that I’m the ideal consumer because if something looks thoughtfully designed or beautifully packaged, I’m immediately interested. He’s probably right. But over time I’ve become less interested in judging myself for it and more interested in understanding why. Because if aesthetics didn’t influence behaviour, companies wouldn’t spend billions of dollars on design. Luxury brands wouldn’t obsess over packaging. Tech companies wouldn’t invest so heavily in user interfaces. Hotels wouldn’t hire interior designers. Retailers wouldn’t spend months perfecting store layouts.

The reality is that before we experience a product, we experience an impression. And that impression starts forming almost immediately.

The Brain Loves a Shortcut

We like to think of ourselves as rational decision-makers. We imagine carefully weighing options, comparing features, evaluating prices, making objective choices. But most decisions don’t begin that way.

Human beings are constantly processing enormous amounts of information, and to make sense of the world efficiently, our brains rely on shortcuts. Instead of analysing everything from scratch, we make quick assessments based on available signals. Is this safe? Can I trust it? Is it worth my attention? These judgments happen long before conscious analysis begins, and in 2006, psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov at Princeton University proved exactly how fast.

In their study, participants were shown photographs of unfamiliar faces for as little as 100 milliseconds, which is one tenth of a second. That brief exposure was enough to form confident assessments of trustworthiness, competence, and likeability. What made the findings particularly striking was that when participants were given more time to look at the same faces, their judgments barely changed. The extra time didn’t produce more accurate impressions. It just made people more confident in the snap judgments they had already made.

Around the same time, researchers at Carleton University ran a similar experiment on websites. They showed participants web pages for either 500 milliseconds or just 50 milliseconds, which is less time than it takes to blink. The aesthetic ratings from both groups were nearly identical. People had formed a clear opinion about whether something felt right or wrong before a single headline was read.

Beauty as a Signal

When a person encounters a brand for the first time, their brain is not reading. It is scanning. It is pulling together colour, shape, texture, spacing, and tone into a single rapid verdict: does this feel right, or does something feel off? This is why a well-designed website feels more trustworthy, why premium packaging feels more valuable, and why an elegant retail space feels more luxurious, even before anyone has tested the product itself.

Psychologists call this the halo effect. When we notice one positive characteristic, we unconsciously assume other positive characteristics must exist as well. If something looks sophisticated, we assume it is sophisticated. If something looks trustworthy, we become more willing to trust it. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that participants who were shown a well-designed product rated its functionality and quality higher than those shown a poorly designed version of the same product. The design hadn’t changed the product. It had changed the perception of the product.

Think about walking into two cafés you’ve never visited before. One has poor lighting, mismatched furniture, and a cluttered menu board. The other feels intentional, clean, thoughtfully put together. Both could serve identical coffee, but most people already have a preference before taking the first sip. Not because they’ve experienced the product, but because they’ve interpreted the signals.

This doesn’t mean aesthetics are deceptive. It means aesthetics communicate. And in environments filled with uncertainty, where a customer has no prior experience with a brand to draw on, those signals carry an outsized amount of weight.

Why Businesses Invest in Aesthetics

One of the biggest misconceptions about aesthetics is that they’re purely decorative, as though design exists only to make things look nice. But great businesses understand something deeper: aesthetics reduce uncertainty.

Every customer arrives with questions. Can I trust this company? Is this worth the price? Will this deliver what it promises? Is this for someone like me? Visual identity helps answer those questions before a single conversation takes place. This is why the world’s strongest brands invest so heavily in design systems, packaging, retail environments, photography, and digital interfaces. Not because aesthetics are the product, but because aesthetics shape expectations about the product. In many cases, design becomes the first proof of competence. A beautifully designed experience suggests attention to detail. Attention to detail suggests care. Care suggests quality. Customers follow that chain of reasoning every day, mostly without realising it.

Research from the Edelman Trust Barometer found that 81% of consumers worldwide say that trusting a brand is a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That trust is rarely built in a single grand gesture. It is built, or lost, in fractions of a second, across every point of contact.

The Danger of Beautiful Lies

Of course, aesthetics have a darker side. Beautiful packaging can hide mediocre products. Elegant branding can disguise weak businesses. Sophisticated design can create expectations that reality cannot support. This is where my father’s advice still holds: all that glitters is not gold.

The problem is that people often stop there. Because while not everything that glitters is gold, very few people ignore something that glitters. Beautiful design earns attention. What happens next depends entirely on the experience that follows. The strongest brands understand this distinction clearly. They don’t use aesthetics to replace substance. They use aesthetics to reveal it.

What Appearance and Reality Have to Do With Each Other

The best brands know that a first impression is powerful but incomplete. Aesthetics create interest. Experience creates satisfaction. Consistency creates trust. All three are necessary, and none of them can do the other’s job.

A beautiful brand that delivers a poor experience eventually disappoints. A great product with poor presentation often struggles to get noticed. The real advantage comes when appearance and reality reinforce each other, when what customers see aligns with what customers receive. That is when aesthetics stop being decoration and start becoming strategy.

We often talk about aesthetics as though they sit on the surface while substance lives underneath. But in practice, aesthetics are rarely just about beauty. They are about communication. They are about signalling. They are about reducing uncertainty and shaping the stories people tell themselves before they have enough information to know whether those stories are true.

The first impression is not the entire decision. But it is almost always where the decision begins. Before we read the copy, before we compare the features, before we understand the offering, we look. And in that moment, the brain has already started making up its mind. The job of a brand is to make sure it makes up the right one.

For decades, Tropicana’s marketing playbook was simple: sell fresh-squeezed orange juice as a morning health routine. But the traditional sit-down breakfast is a dying ritual. Gen Z and Millennial consumers are skipping morning meals, cutting down on sugar, and opting for functional energy drinks like Celsius or Ghost. To younger demographics, traditional OJ has become a relic of the past, causing the morning juice market to soften dramatically.

Faced with this shift in consumer behavior, Tropicana had to convert its strategy. It could no longer rely on a single-use occasion.

The Strategy: From Product to Emotion

Tropicana’s new “Give Life Some Juice” campaign, created by agency Fig, pulls the brand out of the morning box. Using a “masterbrand” approach, the company is consolidating all of its fruit-based beverages under one modernized identity to target a new audience and a new time of day: the afternoon slump.

The campaign’s hero spot opens on a lethargic sloth hanging from a tree in a hyper-realistic animated jungle. The sloth reaches for a bottle of Tropicana, takes a sip, and transforms completely. He drops from the tree, struts through the jungle with inexplicable confidence, high-fives other animals, and eventually rides a pink flamingo through the air. The whole thing plays out over the song “UP!” by Forrest Frank and Connor Price, a track that feels more Spotify playlist than juice aisle.

Hijacking the Energy Drink Market

The sluggish sloth is a calculated mirror for modern young professionals hitting the 2:00 PM corporate wall. By pairing this high-energy transformation with a viral track, Tropicana is actively invading the cultural territory currently dominated by coffee and energy drinks.

The ad recontextualizes the product completely. The word “juice” is no longer presented as liquid fruit, but as cultural slang for power, swagger, and vitality. Tropicana is no longer selling morning vitamins; it is selling an emotional escape hatch for afternoon burnout. It is a bold bet that absurd, high-energy confidence can make a legacy beverage relevant to a generation that has abandoned the breakfast table.

Etsy was born in a Brooklyn apartment in 2005. Robert Kalin, a furniture maker who could not find a decent place to sell his hand-crafted wooden computer cases, built the platform in two and a half months with two programmer friends. The whole point was to be the opposite of what already existed. Not eBay, with its auction format and warehouse energy. Not Amazon, with its obsession with speed and scale. Etsy was supposed to be the place where you bought something because a real person made it.

For years, that difference was the product. Etsy’s brand equity was the exact opposite of a commodity marketplace. You did not go there to find the cheapest option or the fastest delivery. You went looking for a deeply personal gift, a custom wedding decoration, or a hand-knitted scarf. Something that existed because a specific person decided to make it. That is an anti-commodity model, and it is a powerful one when it works.

The magic of the early platform was the feeling of the hunt. Buyers felt they were interacting directly with human creators, buying a piece of someone’s passion rather than a product from a corporate assembly line. That feeling is not easy to manufacture. Etsy did not manufacture it. It protected it, until it stopped.

The first crack appeared in 2013, when CEO Chad Dickerson updated Etsy’s seller rules to allow the use of external manufacturing partners. The intention was reasonable: let independent artists scale up by outsourcing things like printing or assembly without losing their place on the platform. What it created in practice was a loophole large enough to drive a shipping container through. Drop-shippers began exploiting the new policy to list factory-made goods sourced from global wholesale sites, framing them as “designed” or “co-produced” pieces. The handmade label started covering a lot of ground it was never meant to cover.

When Etsy went public in 2015, the pressure to look the other way intensified. Satisfying public shareholders meant demonstrating rapid revenue growth, and high-volume commercial sellers generated significantly more in listing and transaction fees than solo artisans making slow, careful, handmade goods ever could. The business model quietly shifted around the brand promise without the brand promise changing. Etsy kept telling the world it was a home for makers. The platform was becoming something more convenient than that.

This is what made the inconsistency so serious. Etsy’s entire brand identity sat on one idea: that what you found here was different from what you found everywhere else. The moment mass-produced goods became a normal part of the Etsy experience, that idea collapsed. Not because Etsy said anything different, but because the platform started feeling like somewhere you had already been. The handmade marketplace was beginning to look a lot like the marketplaces it was built to be distinct from.

Buyers noticed, even if they could not have explained exactly why. Active buyers peaked at 92 million in 2023 and fell to 87.3 million by mid-2025. That is millions of people who came expecting something specific, found something less certain, and quietly stopped returning.

On May 26, Etsy launched “Celebrate Being Human.” Created by Orchard Creative, the 60-second campaign counts out a human life in numbers: 76 summers, six best friends, four best dog friends, 1,205 firsts. It does not open with products. It opens with the moments that make buying something meaningful in the first place. The voiceover is the agency’s own creative director, whose scratch recording stayed in the final cut because nothing more polished sounded as real. Even that small decision is Etsy gesturing at what it claims to stand for.

The timing is well-judged. AI is reshaping how people discover and buy almost everything online. Shopping feeds are generated. Recommendations are automated. The experience of buying something is becoming faster, smoother, and increasingly difficult to distinguish from one platform to the next. A marketplace genuinely built around real people making things for other real people has a rare opening right now. The appetite for something that actually feels human is growing, and Etsy was supposed to be exactly that.

The campaign is a clear statement of what Etsy claims to be. Whether the platform itself catches up to that claim is the more interesting thing to watch. If it does, and the experience of shopping on Etsy starts to feel as distinct as the story it is telling, then Etsy will have something that no other major marketplace can easily replicate.

Verizon’s latest ad campaign brings back Mike Myers as Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. In the commercial, the bald villain unveils his latest scheme for world domination: a wireless carrier called “Menace Mobile,” complete with the most confusing pricing plans of all time. The twist? His own henchmen refuse to join because they have already switched to Verizon.

The joke lands because it is painfully true. For decades, telecom plans have been a masterclass in deliberate consumer confusion. Hidden activation fees, upgrade penalties, and convoluted data tiers are exactly what an evil supervillain would design.

But Verizon isn’t just running a funny ad. They are announcing a massive product overhaul to fight subscriber losses to competitors. Led by Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland, Verizon has dismantled its old fee structure and rebuilt it from scratch:

• The Simplicity Plan: A flat $45 monthly rate for 5G that completely eliminates the industry-standard $40 activation and $40 upgrade fees.

• The “Verizon One” Bill: A single-statement bill that combines home fiber internet and unlimited mobile data for a flat $70 a month, with all taxes and fees fully included.

• Verizon Dollars: A 3% monthly cash-back program redeemable for device upgrades or gift cards at Sephora, Starbucks, Hilton, and Marriott.

These are not cosmetic tweaks; this is a structural business repair.

So why use Dr. Evil to say it? Because customers do not trust good news from a phone company. If a phone company puts out a straightforward press release about “low fees,” people instantly tune it out. Nostalgia works because familiar, beloved characters create psychological warmth. Dr. Evil disarms the audience’s natural defenses, making them laughing and receptive by the time the sales pitch begins.

Crucially, Verizon never claims to be the “good guy.” Instead, Dr. Evil’s own henchmen abandon him for the network. Corporate self-promotion feels like marketing spin, but when a villain’s crew switches sides, it feels like an organic verdict.

To maximize this rollout, Verizon ran a dual-track nostalgia strategy. While Dr. Evil targeted the general market, a second ad reunited the cast of the historic telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea to connect authentically with U.S. Latino audiences.

Same product overhaul, two different nostalgia keys, used with surgical precision. Nostalgia guarantees the initial cultural breakthrough, but long-term trust will ultimately be earned on the monthly bill.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that YouTube has officially surpassed Netflix in average daily viewing time. Data from media analytics firm Digital i shows that global users now log an average of 99.1 minutes per day on YouTube, ahead of Netflix’s 93.4 minutes. To understand this milestone, look past the financial metrics or data charts. This is a story of brand behaviour, brand identity, and how two entertainment giants built completely different relationships with human attention.

How They Look: The UX of “Curation” vs. the Feed of “Intent”

The visual interface of a platform shapes how a user feels before a single frame of video plays.

The Netflix Look: Netflix presents itself as a prestigious digital theatre. It uses a dark, glossy, cinematic aesthetic built around neat rows of high-quality posters. But this look comes with friction built into it. It demands a specific behaviour from the user: commitment. To choose a Netflix title is to commit to a structured 45-minute episode or a two-hour film.

The YouTube Look: YouTube behaves less like a curated archive and more like an open extension of whatever you feel like watching. Its visual landscape, dominated by creator thumbnails, custom text overlays, and live view counts, signals instant accessibility. Instead of demanding a commitment, YouTube looks like an open buffet. This shift directly influenced the living room migration. As TV screens became YouTube’s fastest-growing device segment, jumping to 35% of its total global watch time, the visual design adapted seamlessly. It managed to look like premium television while still feeling as easy to browse as a social feed.

How They Feel: The Defection from Hollywood Gloss to Deep Authenticity

A brand’s emotional pull is defined by who holds the power in the relationship between platform and viewer. Right now, that dynamic is shifting. Audiences are increasingly experiencing what you might call perfection fatigue.

The Netflix Friction: Netflix feels top-down and highly manufactured. Its content is filtered through Hollywood executives, focus groups, and multi-million-dollar production sets. While visually impressive, that level of polish can feel sterile and emotionally distant. When you watch a Netflix show, there is a quiet awareness that you are being sold a carefully constructed product.

The YouTube Connection: YouTube feels raw, human, and genuinely authentic. Its brand identity is decentralised. It does not try to dictate culture from a boardroom. Instead, it stepped back and let real people define the platform. This is exactly why YouTube conquered the living room screen. Audiences no longer just want to be entertained by untouchable celebrities. They want real connection. A creator filming an unedited video essay from their bedroom feels like a trusted peer sharing a passion. A high-production Netflix drama can feel like a studio making its case for your subscription renewal. YouTube did not win by having more videos. It won by aligning with a generation of viewers who value real human connection over corporate perfection. Even Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged it, saying plainly: “YouTube is not just cat videos anymore.”

How They Behave: The Night-Time Ritual vs. The All-Day Habit

Netflix’s brand behaviour is tied to a specific window of the day. It is an evening activity, designed for wind-down leisure. It requires your full attention, a comfortable couch, and an empty schedule. YouTube has no such restriction. Because it carries 60-second Shorts, 10-minute tutorials, three-hour video podcasts, and live events all at once, it finds its way into every hour of a user’s day. YouTube is playing while you cook breakfast, running in the background during the 2pm office slump, and streaming a documentary on the living room television at midnight. Netflix is an occasional destination. YouTube is something you just have on.

The Ultimate Branding Verdict

Netflix built a strong content library behind a subscription wall. The wall is the problem. By positioning itself as a premium product, Netflix became something users have to actively justify paying for every month. YouTube removed the financial barrier entirely. By leaning into creator authenticity, removing the cost of entry, and designing for every hour of the day rather than just the evening, YouTube changed how it looked, felt, and behaved until the world stopped calling it an app, and simply started calling it television.

“We’re a skincare brand.” “We’re a software company.” “We’re a luxury fashion house.”

Ask them what they do and the answers come even faster.

“We help people manage their finances.” “We make clean beauty products.” “We create high-performance athletic wear.”

But ask a third question and watch the room go quiet.

Why does it matter?

Strategist Greg Galle framed it this way: every brand should be able to answer three deceptively simple questions. Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? The first two are almost always answered with confidence. The third one is where most brands get found out.

Not because they have nothing to say. But because they often confuse a business function with a reason to exist. A meal delivery service says it delivers meals. A productivity app says it helps people stay organised. A bank says it provides financial services. All true. None particularly meaningful.

Customers rarely build lasting relationships with brands because of what they do. They build them because of what those actions mean in their lives. And that gap between function and meaning is exactly where branding lives.

The Identity Trap

Here is one of the most common misconceptions in branding: a category description is not a brand strategy.

Being a beauty brand is not a strategy. Being a furniture company is not a strategy. Being a luxury hotel is not a strategy. Those are classifications. A filing system. Yet a surprising number of brands spend significant energy refining what they are while spending very little time figuring out why they deserve attention in the first place.

This is why so many brand websites feel interchangeable. Change the logo at the top and half the copy could belong to a direct competitor. The problem is rarely a lack of creativity. It is a lack of meaning.

Marty Neumeier, in his book The Brand Gap, argues that differentiation is at the centre of branding. If customers cannot perceive a meaningful difference between you and someone else, they will default to convenience, price, or habit. The challenge is that meaningful difference is far harder to uncover than product difference. Most businesses begin by focusing on operations: how to make something, how to sell it, how to scale it. Meaning often arrives much later, if it arrives at all.

And when brands do try to articulate it, they tend to retreat into language that sounds important but says very little.

“We empower people.” “We inspire confidence.” “We drive innovation.”

These statements do not tell us anything distinctive. Every brand in every category could say them without technically lying. The strongest brands do not just communicate a benefit. They communicate a belief. A point of view on the world that helps people understand why this brand exists instead of another one.

Why Focus Is So Hard

Neumeier also makes a point about focus that is worth sitting with. Focus is one of the hardest disciplines in branding, not because brands do not understand its value, but because committing to one thing means actively saying no to many others.

Every brand wants more customers. More categories. More revenue streams. Focus feels like leaving money on the table. But the brands people actually remember are almost always the ones that chose a lane and stayed in it long enough for a real association to form.

The irony is painful: many brands become vague in an attempt to appeal to everyone, and in doing so, become memorable to no one. Meaning requires commitment, and commitment requires focus. The two ideas cannot really be separated.

The Role of Storytelling

Here is where it gets interesting. Most people treat the question of why a brand matters as a messaging problem. Something to solve in a copy document or a brand guidelines PDF. But it is not a messaging problem. It is a storytelling problem.

There is a difference.

Messaging is what you say. Storytelling is the structure through which meaning is made and transferred. A good brand story does not just tell people what a company does. It places the customer inside a world where the brand’s existence makes sense, where the brand’s values feel obvious rather than performed, and where choosing that brand feels less like a transaction and more like an alignment.

Take Dove. On paper, it sells soap and moisturiser. What it actually does is tell a story about the relationship between women and their own reflection. The Real Beauty campaign, which launched in 2004, did not introduce a better formula. It introduced a different frame: that beauty standards had been set by an industry with a commercial interest in making women feel inadequate, and that Dove was choosing a different side. That story gave the brand a reason to exist beyond personal care. It gave people a reason to feel something when they chose it.

Or consider Airbnb, a company that is technically in the accommodation business. What it actually sells is the idea that anywhere in the world can feel like home, and that travel should be about belonging rather than just arriving. Its 2014 rebrand introduced the Bélo, a symbol it described as representing people, places, love, and Airbnb itself. That is an ambitious thing to ask of a logo. But it worked because the story underneath it was coherent. Airbnb never tried to out-hotel the hotels. It did not compete on bigger rooms or better amenities. It told a completely different story about what travel is for, one where the goal is not just to reach a destination but to feel like you belong there. That shift in framing is why people choose an Airbnb even when a hotel would be easier.

The story did not decorate these brands. The story was the brand.

This is what answering the third question actually looks like in practice. Not a mission statement. Not a slogan. A coherent narrative that connects who you are to what you do to why any of it matters, in a way that a customer can feel without being told what to feel.

A Quick Brand Audit

Let us run Galle’s three questions against a few familiar names.

Apple

Who are you? A technology company.

What do you do? Design and sell consumer technology products and software.

Why does it matter? Because Apple has spent decades making technology feel intuitive, personal, and human. The products are important. The belief underneath them, that technology should feel empowering rather than alienating, is what people actually buy into. That belief is the story Apple has been telling since 1984, and it has barely changed the plot.

Nike

Who are you? An athletic apparel company.

What do you do? Create footwear, apparel, and equipment for sport.

Why does it matter? Because Nike turned athletic effort into identity. The brand’s message has never really been about shoes. It has been about human potential. About the athlete inside every person who laces up, regardless of their actual ability level. That story has proven elastic enough to expand across decades, sports, and cultures without losing coherence.

A Typical Consulting Firm

Who are you? A consulting firm.

What do you do? Help businesses solve complex problems.

Why does it matter? This is where things often go quiet. Many firms stop at question two. The strongest ones go further. They identify the specific transformation they enable and the belief driving that transformation. Without that clarity, they become another logo in a sea of expertise claims, distinguished only by price point and network.

The audit is not designed to be cruel. It is designed to be honest. Most brands can answer two out of three questions fluently. The third one reveals whether the brand has done the deeper work.

Meaning Is Not a Marketing Exercise

Many assume that uncovering why a brand matters is a task for the marketing team. It is not. It is a strategic exercise that sits upstream of everything else.

You cannot write compelling copy for a purpose that has not been defined. You cannot design a meaningful visual identity around an idea that does not exist. You cannot expect customers to understand your significance if you have not done the work yourself.

This is why the best brands treat clarity as a discipline rather than a deliverable. Not a one-time workshop. Not a rebranding project that gets shelved after the logo refresh. A discipline. Something that gets examined every time a new product launches, a new campaign goes live, or a new opportunity appears. Because every decision either sharpens the answer or blurs it.

The story a brand tells is not static. It evolves as the brand grows, as the market shifts, as culture moves. But the spine of that story, the reason the brand exists and the belief it holds, should remain consistent. That consistency is what makes a brand trustworthy over time.

The Question Worth Asking

Most businesses spend their lives answering the question: what do we do?

The brands that endure answer a different one: why would the world miss us if we disappeared?

That is the real test. Not whether customers understand your product, but whether they understand your significance. Not whether they can describe you, but whether they would notice your absence.

Because in a crowded market, being known for what you do is useful. Being known for why you matter, and being able to tell that story clearly, is what actually builds a brand.

The question is deceptively simple.

The work behind it is not.

From Product to Person

For a long time, brand strategy was built around a concept called the USP, short for Unique Selling Proposition. The idea is simple: figure out what makes your product different, then shout about it. Better cushioning. Longer battery life. Fewer calories. The assumption was that if the product was good enough, people would follow. And for a while, in markets where options were limited and consumers were less discerning, it worked.

Then things got complicated.

In The Brand Gap, branding strategist Marty Neumeier references a challenge from cognitive expert Edward de Bono that quietly upended the whole model. De Bono argued that instead of fixating on the USP, brands should be paying attention to something else entirely: the UBS. The Unique Buying State of their customer. The USP is about the product. The UBS is about the person. Specifically, it is about what emotional state that person is in when they decide to reach for your brand over someone else’s. What do they believe about themselves? What do they want to feel? What does choosing your brand say about who they are?

It sounds like a subtle distinction. It is not. It is the difference between a brand that sells you something and a brand that understands you.

How Dove Rewrote the Brief

Dove figured this out in 2004, and it is still talking about it. Before the Campaign for Real Beauty launched, Dove was a mid-market personal care brand doing what all its competitors were doing: making functional claims. Moisturising. Cleansing. Caring for your skin. Useful, credible, and completely forgettable. The beauty category was built on the same formula: show aspirational imagery, suggest transformation, sell product.

Then Dove commissioned research and found something that should have shocked the industry but somehow had not: only 2% to 4% of women globally described themselves as beautiful. That was the insight. Not a product insight. A person insight. Their customer was not walking around thinking about moisturiser. She was walking around feeling unseen, held to standards she had not set, and quietly exhausted by advertising that looked nothing like her.

Dove did not respond by improving its formula. It responded by rebuilding how it showed up. Instead of aspirational models, it put real women on billboards. Wrinkles, curves, grey hair, all of it. The brand’s communication stopped being about what the product could do and started being about what the customer actually felt. The campaign ran in over 35 countries. It has since evolved through documentaries, school programmes, a pledge never to use AI to distort women’s images, and partnerships with UNICEF. Two decades on, it is still the same founding insight doing the work. Dove understood the Unique Buying State of its customer and built an entire brand identity around it.

That is not a marketing campaign. That is architecture.

How Canva Spoke Directly to Its Customer

Canva pulled off a version of the same strategy in 2025, though with considerably more wit. The design software company took over fourteen billboards at London’s Waterloo Station with copy that went directly after the lived experience of its target customer: designers and creative professionals. One board read “When ‘make the logo bigger’ goes a bit too far.” Another riffed on the kind of client feedback that makes designers briefly consider new careers. No product features. No subscription pricing. Just Canva stepping entirely inside the frustration of the person it was talking to.

The boards were photographed and shared widely online. People did not share them because they were informative. They shared them because they felt seen. That is UBS in a tube station.

How Gap Sold a Feeling, Not a Product

Gap did something similar, though the emotional register was completely different. In 2025, the brand paired classic denim with Kelis’ “Milkshake” and choreography that spread across social platforms fast enough to make people briefly forget Gap had been having a difficult decade. The campaign then extended into curated Spotify playlists, showing that Gap understood the buying state of its customer was not simply “needs jeans.” It was a mood. Nostalgia, ease, the desire to feel effortlessly cool in a way that does not require too much effort. Gap did not sell denim. It sold a feeling that denim could unlock.

What Happened When Nike Stopped Listening

And then there is Nike, which serves as both the gold standard and a useful cautionary tale, sometimes in the same breath.

Nike has long been the case study everyone reaches for when talking about consumer-centric branding. Marty Neumeier used it in The Brand Gap specifically to illustrate the UBS principle in action. Nike does not lead with shoe technology. It leads with what the person wearing the shoe believes about themselves. For decades, “Just Do It” was not a product claim. It was an identity invitation.

Then, somewhere in the mid-2020s, Nike lost the thread. Under former CEO John Donahoe, the brand pivoted hard toward digital efficiency, direct-to-consumer sales, and margin optimisation. It pulled back from wholesale retailers, cut brand-building budgets, and became, in the words of returning CEO Elliott Hill, “too transactional.” The brand stopped thinking about who its customer was and started thinking about how to reach them more cheaply.

The numbers followed. Nike reported an 8% revenue drop in North America in Q4 2024 and a 25% decline in market value over the year. The brand had not changed its logo or its iconic swoosh. It had simply stopped showing up for the emotional state of the person it was supposed to be for. And consumers noticed, even if they could not have told you exactly what was different.

Hill’s reset was direct. He reorganised the company’s entire structure around the consumer, not the product. He restructured leadership to put sport and the athlete at the centre of every decision. And then, in February 2025, Nike returned to the Super Bowl for the first time in 27 years with a 60-second film called “So Win.” Shot in black and white, narrated by rapper Doechii, the ad featured elite female athletes and listed everything society tells women they cannot do, then simply concluded: so win. Not a single product was named. No mention of cushioning or carbon fibre plates. Just a brand showing up entirely inside the emotional state of its customer. It won the Super Clio for best ad of the Super Bowl. It generated 21% of all Super Bowl conversation. Brand health increased eight points in the weeks that followed.

Nike did not recover by building a better shoe. It recovered by remembering who it was building for.

The Pattern Behind the Strategy

That is the real lesson across all four of these brands. The product is not the point of entry. The person is. Dove’s customer was not looking for a better bar of soap. They were looking to feel like beauty included them. Canva’s customer was not looking for another feature comparison. They were looking to feel understood in their daily frustration. Gap’s customer was not looking for new denim. They were looking to recapture a feeling. And Nike’s customer was not looking for better performance technology. They were looking for a brand that believed in them the way they were trying to believe in themselves.

The brands that get this right are not simply good at marketing. They are good at listening, and even better at designing everything they do around what they hear. The product gets you in the room. The UBS keeps you in the building.

A brand that knows you does not need to convince you. You already feel like it was made for you. Because it was.

The Week in Full

One brand demonstrated this week that values can be acquired. The other demonstrated that values can be engineered into the experience itself. Whether SHEIN can protect what it bought from Everlane is an open question, though history suggests the intangible thing a brand is purchased for tends to be the first thing the new owners erode. Oatly, meanwhile, put its values in a bike lane in Amsterdam-Noord, where they are difficult to argue with and impossible to ignore.

SHEIN went shopping for credibility. Oatly went cycling.

Everlane: Credibility, For Sale?

Everlane was built on a very specific promise. When it launched in 2011, it told shoppers exactly what it cost to make each piece of clothing, down to the materials, the labour, and the transport, then showed them what a “traditional retailer” would charge for the same thing. They trademarked the phrase “radical transparency.” That was the product, as much as the clothes themselves.

Last week, SHEIN made the decision to acquire the brand for approximately $100 million.

SHEIN is one of the largest fast-fashion companies in the world, famous, or depending on your vantage point infamous, for $15 dresses and a manufacturing operation that moves faster than most fashion brands can think. Everlane’s majority owner, private equity firm L Catterton, was carrying roughly $90 million in debt it needed to exit, and the $100 million sale price barely covers it, a long fall from the $600 million the brand commanded in 2020.

Could SHEIN be less interested in Everlane’s clothes and more interested in what they represent? SHEIN is working toward a public stock market listing, a process complicated by US-China trade tensions. Owning an American brand built on factory transparency and sustainability looks very useful when investors and regulators start asking questions about where your clothes come from. A brand widely associated with overproduction and disputed labour conditions now owns one that built its entire identity around publishing cost breakdowns and auditing factories. So who is actually being saved here?

According to CEO Alfred Chang, Everlane will continue to run as an independent brand, meaning it keeps its own name, its own identity, and will not be folded into SHEIN’s existing operation. He added that the brand is committed to “staying true to our longstanding brand values, sustainability commitments, and exceptional quality.” That is the standard line in every acquisition press release and it is probably sincere. The harder question is whether the thing that made Everlane worth acquiring is the thing that survives the acquisition.

Everlane’s brand value was inseparable from its independence. The transparency argument, the cost breakdowns, the ethical factory audits, all of it only worked because the company making the argument appeared structurally removed from the fast fashion machine. Once you become a subsidiary of the company that arguably represents that machine more than almost anyone else, the argument becomes very difficult to make without people squinting at it. As one analyst put it, “the deal likely saves Everlane, but that salvation comes at a price.”

The price Everlane pays for being rescued is its credibility. Which, not coincidentally, could be exactly what SHEIN came searching for.

Oatly: What the Bike-Thru Actually Signals

While one sustainable brand figures out what its values mean under new ownership, another has been making its values physically visible in Amsterdam.

Oatly, the Swedish oat milk company, opened what it is calling the world’s first Bike-Thru in Amsterdam this month. The concept is exactly what it sounds like: cyclists pedal through a dedicated lane, order a specialty coffee drink made with Oatly, pay, collect it, and continue riding without ever dismounting. No engines, no parking, no compromise. The pop-up runs until June 7 and features a weekly rotating lineup of international specialty coffee roasters.

Amsterdam was the only sensible city for this. It is a city where bikes outnumber people, where cycling is not a lifestyle statement but simply how you move from one place to another. To have opened a car-based drive-thru there would have been baffling. Oatly walked up to the obvious and built it.

That sounds simple. It is not.

Oatly’s brand identity is built on the idea that small, everyday choices, like swapping dairy for oat milk in your morning coffee, add up to something meaningful for the planet. Rather than just saying that, they built an experience around it in a city where it could naturally fit into their customer’s life. That is the difference between a brand value you read about and one you actually live. They designed around what the customer was already doing, which is what makes it both experiential and customer-centric. As Oatly’s general manager for the Benelux region put it: “What if the best way to change behaviour wasn’t to ask for it, but to design for what already exists? In Amsterdam, that means bikes.” They did not lecture anyone about sustainable transport. They just put themselves in the middle of it.

Oatly did not create a new habit. They found an existing one and made themselves part of it. That is what it looks like when a brand genuinely understands its customer’s life.

When a brand signs a celebrity, the assumption is straightforward: they want access to that person’s audience. The celebrity brings fans, the brand gets exposure, and everybody calls it a partnership. It is one of the oldest playbooks in marketing, and it is also the wrong way to read what On Running has been quietly doing for the past few years.

On is a Swiss sportswear brand founded in 2010. Their product is technically impressive — a distinctive cushioning system, clean design, a loyal runner’s following. But for a long time, they lived in a specific lane. Performance gear. A brand that serious athletes trusted and that fashion people were starting to notice, but had not fully claimed.

That is changing. And the way it is changing tells you everything about how ambitious brands expand into territory their product alone cannot reach.

Loewe: Buying a Ticket Into Luxury

In 2022, On announced a collaboration with Loewe. For readers unfamiliar: Loewe is a Spanish luxury house founded in 1846, known for its leather craftsmanship and its position as one of the most respected names in high fashion. Under creative director Jonathan Anderson, the brand became associated with a kind of fashion intelligence. Not flashy, not loud, but deeply considered. The kind of brand that people in the industry watch closely.

The Loewe partnership was notable for a specific reason: it was the first time Loewe had ever collaborated with another brand outside of fashion. A 176-year-old luxury house, known for doing things strictly on its own terms, chose On as its first outside partner. That is not a small thing.

The collaboration produced co-designed shoes and technical apparel, combining Loewe’s craft sensibility with On’s performance engineering. The shoes were recognisably On, but refined, with Loewe’s subtle design language pulling them into a different register. Something you might see in a luxury boutique, not just a running store.

But the product was almost secondary to the signal. On had just been endorsed, at the highest level, by a brand that almost never endorses anyone. In the language of brand credibility, that is the equivalent of being invited to a table you previously had no business sitting at. The partnership has now run to six capsules, and each one quietly reinforces On’s right to exist in that space.

FKA Twigs: Buying a Ticket Into Culture

FKA twigs is a British musician, dancer and visual artist known for work that sits at the intersection of avant-garde music, physical performance and art. She is not a mainstream celebrity. She is a taste-maker: the kind of figure whose influence moves through the fashion world and the arts world before it reaches anywhere else. People who follow her know her for her physical discipline, her creative intensity, and her refusal to do things she does not believe in.

In 2024, On announced FKA twigs as a creative partner for their training vertical, the part of the business focused on gym and movement apparel. The campaign she fronted, “The Body Is Art,” reframed training not as exercise but as artistic expression. Shot in industrial warehouses in London, directed in part by twigs herself, it featured Paralympic athletes and professional bodybuilders alongside dancers. It was not a traditional campaign. It was a statement about what On thought training could mean.

This was not a standard ambassador deal. FKA twigs shaped the creative philosophy, and eventually co-designed an entire capsule collection: her own shoes, her own silhouettes, built around how she actually moves through the world.

The territory On was buying into here was different from Loewe. Not luxury, but cultural seriousness. The message was: this is a brand that artists trust enough to actually make things with. That kind of credibility cannot be purchased through advertising. It comes from association with people who would never lend their name to something they did not genuinely care about.

Zendaya: Buying a Ticket Into the Mainstream

Then came Zendaya. If Loewe opened the door to luxury and FKA twigs opened the door to cultural credibility, Zendaya opened the largest door of all: broad cultural relevance, at scale, with taste still attached.

Zendaya is one of the most recognisable entertainers in the world. But what makes her valuable to On specifically is not her fame in isolation. It is the combination of fame and aesthetic authority. Working closely with her longtime stylist Law Roach, she has become known for fashion choices that are considered and widely discussed. She is not just popular. She is trusted.

The partnership launched in June 2024, and again, it was structured as more than an endorsement. Zendaya co-designed shoes for On, contributed to their apparel collections, and starred in campaigns built around her creative point of view. The announcement alone generated $3.5 million in media impact value. Law Roach was later folded into the creative process as a collaborator, which extended On’s reach further into the styling and fashion world.

The timing also mattered. Zendaya had just starred in Challengers, a film in which she played a professional tennis player. On has a growing tennis category. The cultural context was already set. On did not manufacture the association. They walked through a door that was already open.

What On Is Actually Building

Taken individually, each of these partnerships makes sense. Taken together, they reveal a deliberate strategy that is easy to miss if you are reading them as marketing decisions rather than construction decisions.

On is assembling an identity that their product alone cannot build. Their shoes are technically excellent, but technical excellence does not buy you a seat in fashion or culture. For that, you need borrowed credibility, extended over time, from people and institutions who already belong there.

Loewe handed them luxury legitimacy. FKA twigs handed them cultural seriousness. Zendaya handed them mainstream authority with taste intact. Each partnership opened a different door. And crucially, On walked through each one with co-designed product, not just campaign imagery. That distinction matters. They are not renting a famous face. They are building a body of creative work that expands what the brand is allowed to be.

Compare this to Birkenstock, which is doing something structurally opposite. Birkenstock’s brand is built around a specific domain: feet, and the philosophy of how feet should be treated. That kind of ownership generates its own expansion logic. When Birkenstock recently moved into nail polish, it was not a leap into beauty. It was a natural extension of what they already owned. They did not need a cultural guide, because they already knew exactly where they were going.

On does not have that yet. Their identity is still being constructed. The partnerships are not decoration. They are infrastructure.

The Lesson

Most brands that study On’s strategy will take the wrong thing from it. They will see the celebrity partnerships and think: we need a famous person. What they should be asking is the question On appears to have asked before each one: what territory do we need to become legible in, and who already belongs there?

A cultural proxy only works when it is precise. Loewe did not make On fashionable in a vague, general sense. It made them legible to a specific audience that cares about craft and restraint. FKA twigs did not simply make On cool. She made them credible to people who treat movement as a serious practice. Zendaya did not just make On famous. She made them relevant to a world the product alone could never have accessed.

The question is not who you partner with. It is what door you are trying to open, and whether the person you have chosen actually holds the key.

The Box Before the Bottle

Miu Miu just launched a fragrance called Fleur de Lait, French for “flower of milk.” The scent is fresh and sweet, built around coconut milk, osmanthus and fruit, and inspired by mango pomelo sago, a popular Southeast Asian dessert made from mango puree, pomelo flesh and soft tapioca-like pearls.

That is the product. The launch is something else.

To introduce it, Miu Miu sent select influencers a branded cooler bag containing what looked like a tub of ice cream. It was kinetic sand: a silicone-bound material, common in children’s toys, that mimics the texture of soft serve and holds its shape until you touch it. A branded scoop was included. To find the perfume bottle, you had to dig for it.

Fragrance has a problem that most beauty categories do not. You cannot smell something through a phone screen. You can watch a lipstick swatch or a skincare transformation, but scent has no visual equivalent. What Miu Miu understood is that if the product cannot travel online, the packaging has to do the traveling.

They did not design a box. They designed a moment: tactile, surprising, and impossible not to post. The sand-scooping is satisfying to watch in the same way ASMR content is. Nobody expects to excavate their way to a perfume. That surprise is exactly why it spreads.

The fragrance sells itself eventually. First, it needs attention. And Miu Miu worked out that in 2026, you do not get attention by showing someone a beautiful bottle.

When Price Is the Only Promise

Spirit Airlines shut down on May 2. After two bankruptcy filings in under two years, a failed merger and a last-ditch attempt at a $500 million federal bailout, the airline cancelled all flights early Saturday morning. Air traffic controllers said goodbye to the final Spirit crew over the radio at Dallas-Fort Worth.

The immediate cause was fuel. The US-Iran war sent jet fuel prices soaring, and Spirit, already deep in debt, could not absorb it. But aviation analysts were quick to point out: fuel did not kill Spirit. It just finished the job.

Spirit was an ultra-low-cost carrier. The model works by stripping almost everything from the base fare and charging separately for luggage, seat selection, snacks, anything a standard airline includes as part of the ticket. The whole business rested on one advantage: being cheaper than everyone else.

That advantage quietly eroded. The major airlines introduced their own bare-bones economy tiers, copying Spirit’s approach. And when the pricing power weakened, there was nothing underneath it. No loyalty. No goodwill. According to JD Power, only a small share of Spirit passengers said they would fly the airline again. It consistently ranked among the lowest in customer satisfaction in the industry.

Other budget carriers prove the model can work. Allegiant Air, which runs a similarly stripped-back operation, consistently ranked above average in satisfaction because passengers felt the experience, minimal as it was, was worth what they paid. Spirit never earned that.

There is a difference between competing on price and building a brand. Spirit spent years doing only one of those things.

What Happened

On Sunday April 27, the London Marathon produced one of the most significant mornings in the history of the sport. Two men, Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe and Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, crossed the finish line in under two hours. Sawe ran 1:59:30. Kejelcha ran 1:59:41. On the women’s side, Tigst Assefa lowered the world record to 2:15:41. Three world records in a single morning.

All three athletes were wearing the same shoe: the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3.

What the Shoe Actually Is

To understand why that matters from a brand perspective, you need to understand what that shoe is and how Adidas brought it to market.

The Pro Evo 3 is Adidas’ most technically ambitious running shoe to date. It weighs 97 grams, making it the first running shoe from any brand to come in under 100 grams. For context, that is lighter than a standard smartphone. It is 30 percent lighter than its predecessor, delivers 11 percent more energy return, and improves running economy by 1.6 percent. It retails for $500.

Adidas did not build this shoe in the weeks before the London Marathon. It was developed over years, tested through more than a dozen iterations, and trialled with athletes at high-altitude training camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. The general public knew nothing about it until a few days before race day, when Adidas revealed its existence for the first time.

The Sequence

Then came the sequencing.

On Saturday April 25, the day before the marathon, a small batch of the Pro Evo 3 went on sale through Adidas.com and a handful of select running retailers. It sold out within minutes. At this point, the shoe had no public track record. No race results. No proof. Just a specification sheet and a price tag.

Then Sunday happened.

The next morning, with the London Marathon results still dominating sports headlines around the world, Adidas opened its main public sale through the Adidas Confirmed app at 11:00 AM. The stock sold out in under two minutes.

The same shoe. A dramatically different context.

The Same Shoe. A Different World.

That is the story. Between Saturday’s drop and Monday’s drop, nothing about the shoe changed. The technology was identical. The price was identical. What changed was what the shoe meant. By Monday morning, the Pro Evo 3 was not a $500 running shoe with impressive specifications. It was the shoe that broke the two-hour barrier. It was a proven object.

Adidas did not react to the marathon results. They structured the entire release around them. The Saturday drop seeded the shoe into the market before the race. The race provided the proof. The Monday drop captured the demand that proof created. Each step was deliberate. The race was not a backdrop to the launch. The race was the campaign.

What the Numbers Said Next

The shoe now lists on StockX for between $1,700 and $2,600 depending on size. On some platforms, listings have reached $4,600, nearly nine times the retail price. Adidas shares rose almost two percent on the Monday after the race.

A wider commercial release is expected during the Fall 2026 marathon season. But the moment Adidas engineered in London cannot be replicated at scale. That is also the point. Scarcity made the desire visible, and the record made the desire rational.

The Bigger Picture

Most brands spend significant money trying to convince people that their product works. Adidas put their product on the fastest runners in the world, at the highest-visibility race on the calendar, and let the finish line do the talking. The sellout that followed was not a marketing outcome. It was a logical response to evidence.

The campaign was the race.