Brand Storytelling

I’ve been thinking about what role AI should actually have in building a brand. For context, I’m a creative who also uses AI in my creative work. I’m interested in what it opens up, and I can still spend hours fixing an image until it feels right. Both of those things are true. So this isn’t a conversation I can have from a distance. I’m using these tools while questioning what they’re doing to the work, to our expectations, and to the way companies value creative people. And

A closer look at the visuals, curiosity and creative choices behind the fragrance brand I keep saving. I’m always paying attention to what’s new. Launches, rebrands, new products. A visual that makes me stop because I haven’t seen anything quite like it before. I love discovering things and learning how they were created. What was the reference? How did they get there? Who thought of that? There are brands I save and share as references way too often. LORE has become one of t

Why craft, nostalgia and imperfection are becoming the new visual language of luxury I spend a lot of time researching visual references. Somewhere between campaign archives, product still lifes and endless folders of imagery, the same kinds of objects keep resurfacing. Wired Apple headphones. Books. Paper. Flowers. Handwriting. Old cameras. Objects that are scratched, folded, tangled or visibly touched. None of them are particularly luxurious. And yet they keep finding their

What last week's campaigns are really telling founders Every week there's a new batch of campaigns to admire, dissect, or scroll past. But every so often the week's stories line up just right, and a pattern emerges that's bigger than any single launch. Last week, it was five of them: Meta baking Kylie Jenner's literal voice into AI glasses. Prada and Gentle Monster choosing imagination over technology in the same breath. Alo floating a tennis court in the middle of the ocean

Consumers aren't buying your formula. They're buying your point of view. There's a conversation I have with almost every founder I work with, usually early on, usually when they're frustrated. They've built something genuinely good. The formula is right. The packaging is considered. The website is clean. They've done the work, all of it, the hard, expensive, unglamorous work of actually making something worth selling. And still, they feel invisible. They look at the brands ge

A Real Talk conversation with Dr. Brent Ridge I walked into this interview thinking I knew the Beekman 1802 story. I had read the book. I had done the research. I knew about the goat farm, the recession, the 52,000 bars of soap. I knew that kindness was the strategy, not the tagline. What I didn't expect was how much of the conversation would feel personal, not just as someone who studies brand strategy, but as someone who is, right now, in the middle of building something he

Before I sit down with Brent Ridge, I've been sitting with his book. I came across Brent Ridge the way a lot of good things happen, unexpectedly, through a conversation that led somewhere I didn't anticipate. I looked him up, found the book, and by the time I was boarding a flight to Warsaw for a podcast recording, I had it downloaded on my iPad and ready. I didn't put it down for the entire flight. Not because it's a page-turner in the conventional sense, but because I kept

Japanese market data is signalling a consumer shift. Here's what European beauty founders need to hear. There's a consumer in the exosome skincare market who researches like a scientist and purchases like a poet. She knows what EGF is. She can explain the difference between PDRN and exosomes. She's read the group threads, watched the dermatologist breakdowns, cross-referenced the ingredient lists. And then she buys the product because a reviewer said her skin had a healthy gl

Why the brands winning beauty and wellness in 2026 are using AI where it adds leverage, and refusing it where it erodes trust. Image created by me in Midjourney The brands winning right now aren't the ones using AI the most. They're the ones using it where it adds leverage and refusing it where it would erode trust. That's the whole post. The rest is the working out. I've been using AI for over three years now. Long enough to have seen both the good and the bad sides, which I

How three wellness brands found their white space by seeing the market differently I spent years in tech selling digital products with one-click efficiency. Launch, optimise, iterate, repeat. The work was fast, the metrics were clean, and the distance between me and the end user was... complete. I never knew who bought what I built. I never heard how it landed. I just moved to the next campaign, the next product release, the next optimisation cycle. And then I started working

As fragrance booms, Byredo’s success reveals why insider codes, cross-cultural references and restraint are redefining value in beauty and wellness In an era where fragrance has re-emerged as one of the fastest-growing categories in global beauty, few brands have navigated its cultural ascent as precisely as Byredo. Once a niche Stockholm-based fragrance house, the brand has evolved into a €1 billion luxury player, propelled not by performance marketing or mass appeal, but by

Aesop case study and why the most powerful brand strategy available to scaling beauty and wellness founders isn't a campaign. Let's start with a provocation. You have spent the last three years building a content engine. You have a posting calendar. You have a UGC strategy. You have an influencer tier, micro, macro, and one mega, who did that one story that drove 4,000 clicks but zero retention. You have repurposed, reformatted, and refreshed. You have hired a social media ma

The shift from aesthetic wellness to measurable health. A conversation with Lisa Tengbom by Paula Ironside. The wellness industry didn't just grow, it expanded into something ambient. It became part of how we signal identity, discipline, even taste. Green juices, cold plunges, infrared saunas, rituals that promise not just health, but a certain kind of life. But as the category scaled, so did a quiet fatigue. Not necessarily with the practices themselves, but with what they r

What Rosalía’s LUX teaches founders about building sacred, human brands in a manufactured world. I remember the first time I heard “Berghain” from Rosalía’s LUX , released in November 2025. I played it on repeat for a week straight. There was something in it, the tension, the restraint, the orchestral swell against her raw voice, that felt timeless. It didn’t sound manufactured. It sounded carved. It shook me in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding dramatic. It fel

Building brands with soul and structure. Four months ago, I made a decision that made complete sense and no sense at all. I left ten years in tech, a world I knew well, a world that trained my brain in systems and scale, and stepped into wellness and beauty. An industry where business collides with identity. Where culture moves faster than product cycles. Where the founder is often the most powerful ingredient in the entire company. I’m not writing this from the safe distance

The wellness optimism era is over. Welcome to wellness overwhelm. For a few years, wellness ran on optimism. Not the sweet, wholesome kind. The caffeinated kind. The kind that said: If you optimise enough, you can do it all. Track everything. Fix everything. Upgrade everything. Turn your life into a dashboard and your nervous system into a KPI. It looked like a hybrid athlete everywhere. Run clubs as social networks. Fitness tourism. Brand races. Brand activations. Brand ever

Finding the one story only your brand can tell There is a moment every founder knows. You scroll through your feed, you look at the brands around you, and something feels off. Not wrong, exactly. Just… loud. Everything is competing for attention, and somewhere underneath all that noise, you sense there might be a quieter, more meaningful way to build. That feeling is worth paying attention to. Because it might be pointing you toward the most important strategic question you'l

Why brand strategy, not campaigns, is the foundation of trust, consistency, and long-term growth. If the past few weeks of writing have circled around one idea, it’s this:Strong brands are not built through more content, more campaigns, or more output. They are built through clarity, consistency, and deliberate decisions over time . This piece sits underneath all of that. Because none of those things, codes, clarity, cohesion, can exist without a strong foundation. And that f

Why the next generation of wellness and beauty businesses won’t be built on aesthetics, but on non-negotiables Across wellness and beauty, we’re hitting a point of aesthetic saturation. Not just in products, but in faces, lighting, copy, tone.The same skin. The same glow. The same language. Repeated, endlessly. And the data is starting to reflect it. Instagram, once the engine of beauty and wellness brands, now sits at some of the lowest engagement rates across platforms, hov

Discernment, product truth, and the quiet strategy behind enduring wellness brands. Last week, I came across a word in English that stopped me for a moment. Discernment. I looked it up. Discernment is the ability to see what’s really going on beneath the surface,to judge well, separate truth from nonsense, and recognise subtle differences. In other words, discernment operates at a deeper level. It’s the ability to recognise what actually matters. Not what is loud. Not what is