The Shimmering

A Person, a Presence, a Brand I was working outside of the city, treasure-hunting. Actually, I was working inside a brand, their teams, looking for treasure — those glimmering and glistening points of compassed reference, the surveilled pin-pricks of a brand mapping,...

THE PERFUME OF YOU

THE MOST EXPENSIVE PERFUME IN THE WORLD A happier scent. It might be said that the most valuable perfume there could be would be your personal scent — the layering of molecular expressions that gather everything from your being, your roadwork, scenes seen — the way...

Looking for Magic

The quest for the magical — in craft, design, business strategies and brand. In a manner, the work that we all do is a quest — the pursuit of a question to be answered, the pathway to a question contained, opened and discovered. What we all do, and what we craft as...

How Strong Is Your Brand?

Resilience, strength, responsiveness Brands, given their human provenance, have human character in their attitude. A brand doesn’t simply move along of its own accord, it’s not a robotic unit, it’s fired and fueled by humans on both sides of the equation. People...

Top [Secret] Design

Brands That Survive on Stealth, Secrecy and Intrigue I was sitting on a jet with a talkative neighbor, a US Marshal, who coincidentally spoke to me on the theories of the layering of police, detection and intelligence — I thought, “how intriguing.” And then wondered...

Your Brand — what could you take away?

Your Brand, too full of “stuff?” What could you take away? In the question of our search for full and robust brands, building them, finding the heart of them, it becomes a query — “when is too much?” Sometimes, it’s better to stay at the heart — the work that resides...

HAVE A NICE DAY

WHAT IS: “A NICE DAY?” Nice is one of those tough words, that’s so vague and so commonly used enough that it made me ponder — “what’s that mean?” In my own journey, I live in a place of perpetual curiosity about words and meaning. I listen to what people...

BrandSpirit

The Quest for Heart and Soul in Branding While it’s been suggested by some that “brands can’t have a soul,” it might be proffered that the inherent intimacy of branding to humanity imparts that they have a character that is imbued with a soul-like intentionality —...