Last summer I watched a couple spend 90 seconds at an Oxfordshire spa. They photographed themselves in various positions around the travertine and adaptogenic lattes, then left. They got their content. They didn't need the experience.
This scene captures what feels broken in wellness branding. The category has perfected the look of authenticity while hollowing out the substance. Earth tones and minimal packaging now signal "trying to look authentic" more than actually being so.
What separates brands that command genuine loyalty from those generating eye-rolls? Alignment between what you claim and what you actually do. Aēsop commissions real architects for each store. Patagonia advises customers against unnecessary purchases. Santa Maria Novella has been operating as a Florentine pharmacy since 1221.
The opportunity for the next generation of wellness brands is to create experiences worth having, not merely photographing. That requires more than better design. It requires truth.
/what-makes-wellness-brands-work/
"Commerce doesn't dull the work, it focuses it." Tomos Parry, chef-owner of Brat and Mountain, on the relationship between business and creativity, and why he sees them as inseparable halves of the same ambition.
Our conversation with him took on fire, Welsh identity, and building a kitchen on its own terms. Link in bio.
📷 copyright Tomos Parry
Standing in Hedonism last autumn, surrounded by 6,500 wines from every producing region on earth, the overwhelming majority looked as though they had been designed by the same committee on the same afternoon - with a few notable exceptions.
The most expensively produced wallpaper we had ever seen. Its a similar picture in supermarkets and retailers.
The label is one of the most powerful commercial asset a wine brand owns. It is also the most wasted, not through carelessness, but through institutional conservatism dressed up as good taste, and a phrase we have heard in more boardrooms than we care to remember: "We would never do that."
Link in bio (/wine-label-design-missed-opportunity/)
#WineDesign #BrandStrategy #LabelDesign #WineMarketing #SpinachBranding
Barking Riverside is what happens when a brand is built with discipline.
One colour, used without apology. A logo with depth, the outline isn't decorative; it traces the shape of the place itself. A system distinct enough that you'd recognise it on a hoarding from across the road.
A lot of property branding hedges. Multiple palettes, soft typography, logos that could belong to anyone. This doesn't. It commits.
That's usually where good brands begin, and bad ones lose their nerve.
#BarkingRiverside #PropertyBranding #PlaceBranding #BrandIdentity #BrandDiscipline #SpinachBranding
Packaging that earns its place on the table.
For Ichibuns, we kept it simple. Kraft, black ink, type so big it commits before you've read the word.
The food does the colour. The packaging gets out of the way.
Most takeaways lose the brand the moment they leave the kitchen. This one carries it home.
#Ichibuns #PackagingDesign #FoodBranding #RestaurantBranding #SpinachBranding
Camelot's annual report had a job that most annual reports don't.
Yes, the numbers. But also a public reminder of where the money goes, the athletes, the artists, the community projects, the buildings restored, the lives changed.
£30 billion raised for good causes since 1994. That's the headline most people never hear.
We treated the report as a brand statement, not an accounting document.
The cover alone earns the conversation before anyone opens it.
#Camelot #NationalLottery #AnnualReport #BrandDesign #DesignForGood #SpinachBranding
The night we launched Maze Row in New York. Fotografiska, downtown, a room full of people who care about wine and the culture around it.
Alongside the brand, we shared edition one of Maze Row Voices (with editorial direction @nargessbanks ) — a wine-and-culture magazine built to live within the brand world.
Brand books should be one of the most-thumbed documents in a company. Most end up the least.
A brand book isn't a launch deliverable. It's a working tool.
Every person in the business, new starter to CEO, should have a copy within reach.
Too many sit on a shelf. Polished, expensive, untouched.
The fix isn't a better PDF. It's building the book for use.
Print or digital. Designed to be opened, argued with, and referred back to.
#BrandBooks #BrandGuidelines #BrandStrategy #BrandIdentity #BrandManagement #VerbalIdentity #DesignSystems #BrandConsistency #PremiumBranding #HospitalityBranding #SpinachBranding #BrandAgency #BrandThinking
Fried chicken is a busy old market. Everyone shouting. Nobody saying anything.
Thunderbird needed a voice as loud as the food.
The Joy of Chicken. Simple pleasures. Fried gold.
Short sentences. Big energy. A tone that hits before you've finished
reading it.
We called it Boltology. High voltage, by design.
Cowshed was born in a cowshed in Somerset. That's not a story. That's the brand.
Natural therapies from the heart and soil of Somerset, England.
A positioning. A sentence that the whole brand could align on.
The best brand work is rarely an invention. It's an excavation, brought to life with storytelling.
When we created CAP Gin, the category was crowded with the same conversation. Juniper lineage. Copper stills. Small-batch romance. Every brand tells a version of the same story.
We went somewhere else. South.
CAP Gin belongs to the Côte d'Azur, a stretch of coastline that has defined European glamour for a century. Fitzgerald and Picasso. Bardot and Grace Kelly. A place the world already loves.
Our job was to claim it.
L'Esprit de la Côte became the brand's organising idea. Not a tagline. A piece of mental real estate, the feeling of palm shadows, sea-salt air, a long lunch that softens into a longer evening.
In a category obsessed with what's in the bottle, we built a brand around where it takes you.
