What is brand?

From Bottle to Building?

I have spent much of my career thinking about brands, although I’m not sure I understood, at least in the beginning, that this was what I was doing. In the mid-2000s, I was building a lifestyle fragrance company that would eventually be sold in 29 countries. At the time, we were ostensibly in the business of fragrance, but what interested me most was everything that existed around the fragrance: the story we were telling, the world the product belonged to, the imagery surrounding it, the packaging someone held in their hands and the emotional connection we could create between an object and the person who chose to bring it into their life.

This was a period when the idea of a “lifestyle brand” was still evolving, especially in how we understand the term today. We were learning how to take a point of view and express it consistently across an expanding collection of physical and digital experiences. There was the fragrance itself, of course, but there was also the bottle, the box, the photography, the language, the retail presentation, the website, and the way the product appeared in different markets around the world. None of these decisions felt incidental. Each one was another opportunity to tell the same story from a slightly different perspective.

Looking back, that experience gave me a definition of brand that has stayed with me for most of two decades. A brand is not simply what something looks like, nor is it the identity system created to represent it. It is the accumulation of impressions we leave with people. It is formed gradually, sometimes consciously and sometimes almost imperceptibly, through every interaction someone has with what we create. The logo matters. The typography matters. The photography and packaging matter. But so does the tone of an email, the way something arrives at your home, the person who answers the telephone, and the feeling you have after the interaction is over.

What has changed for me is not so much my understanding of brand as the scale at which I can now explore it. Twenty years ago, I was building a world around an object small enough to hold in your hand. Today, much of my work involves building worlds that people can physically enter.

That shift from product to place has made the question of brand infinitely more interesting.

Can a Space Be a Brand?

Hospitality has a peculiar relationship with branding because the product is not really the building. A hotel may own a beautiful building, a restaurant may have an extraordinary dining room, and a wellness club may have perfectly considered interiors, but none of those things alone constitute the experience. The actual product is far more elusive. It exists somewhere between the physical environment and what happens inside it. When I begin thinking about a hospitality concept today, I still ask many of the questions I asked when developing consumer products years ago. What is the story? What makes this distinctive? Who is it for? What should someone understand about it without being explicitly told? But another question has become increasingly important in my work: How should someone feel here?

That question changes the creative process because it forces us beyond aesthetics. If we want a space to create a sense of belonging, for example, we have to ask whether the architecture actually encourages people to gather. If we describe a brand as warm, the arrival experience should feel warm. If we talk about restoration, but every interaction requires an app, a transaction, a QR code, or another decision, then perhaps we have designed something visually compelling without designing something particularly restorative.

This is where I believe brand becomes much more expansive than conventional identity. Architecture becomes an expression of brand, but so do lighting, landscape, music, scent, food, uniforms, programming and service. The website someone visits before arriving is part of the same experience as the front door they eventually walk through. The person who greets them is communicating the brand as clearly as the typography on the menu. Even moments that seem unrelated to “branding” are often when the brand is understood most clearly.

For the guest, after all, there are no departments. There is simply the experience.

Getting deep with The Den.

I have been thinking about this constantly while developing The Den, our social wellness club in Austin. From the beginning, I was less interested in creating another space filled with the familiar vocabulary of contemporary wellness than I was in understanding what wellness might feel like when approached through hospitality and human connection.

There are, naturally, physical components to that experience. We have thought carefully about materials, landscape, movement, sauna, cold plunge, tea, food, music, lighting and the objects people encounter throughout the property. Those choices matter enormously to me because environments communicate before anyone says a word. A room can signal whether you are expected to linger or move along, whether you are invited to participate or merely observe, whether the experience is precious or generous.

But somewhere along the process, I kept returning our teams to something that couldn't be specified on an architectural drawing or purchased as part of an FF&E package: Omotenashi, the Japanese philosophy of hospitality rooted in thoughtful, anticipatory care. What resonates with me about Omotenashi is not ceremony for ceremony's sake, nor am I interested in simply importing a Japanese hospitality tradition and applying it superficially to an American wellness club. What interests me is the underlying discipline of paying attention. It asks us to consider the guest closely enough that care can sometimes happen before it's requested.

In practice, that can be remarkably subtle. It might mean remembering how someone takes their tea, recognizing when a person wants conversation and when they would rather have silence, anticipating that someone coming out of the sauna will need water without making them ask for it, or simply learning a member’s name and using it naturally. None of these gestures is particularly expensive. Most of them will never appear in a photograph or a marketing campaign. Yet I would argue that they may ultimately communicate more about The Den than almost anything we design.

That, to me, is where service becomes brand.

From creating products to designing memory

There is an interesting symmetry between fragrance and hospitality that I did not fully appreciate until recently. Both are deeply connected to memory, and neither can be completely understood by looking at them.

You can photograph a perfume bottle beautifully, but you cannot photograph the experience of scent. In much the same way, we can photograph a hotel, restaurant, or wellness club endlessly, and hospitality certainly loves a beautiful photograph, but the image can only communicate so much. It can show the materiality of the room, the quality of the light, the objects on the table and the landscape beyond the window. What it cannot fully capture is the way someone treated you while you were there. That is the part people carry home. As my work has evolved, I have become increasingly interested in this distinction.

I still believe deeply in aesthetics. Beauty matters. Design matters. Details matter. I can obsess over the proportion of a piece of millwork, the warmth of a light source, the texture of a material, or the exact green on a wall because those decisions shape our emotional response to an environment. But I no longer believe the work ends when the space is finished. In many ways, that is when the brand finally begins. The people operating the space take possession of the story we have been building and translate it into hundreds of human interactions every day. A beautiful room can establish an expectation, but the experience either fulfills or contradicts it. When those two things align, when the physical environment and the human experience communicate the same idea, something much more powerful than design emerges.

The Brand Is the “that thing”

We live increasingly fluid lives between physical and digital environments, which makes this idea even more important. Someone might first encounter a hospitality brand through a photograph on Instagram, visit its website weeks later, receive an email, make a reservation on their phone, walk through its front door, interact with a host, order something to drink, attend a class, buy a product, and eventually tell a friend about the experience. Internally, those moments may belong to marketing, digital, operations, food and beverage, design, retail or programming. To the person experiencing them, however, they belong to one thing.

The brand. This is why I have always struggled with separating brand from product, design, experience, and operations too neatly. I understand the organizational need for disciplines, but creatively they are inseparable. A brand is being created every time a decision is made about how a person encounters the business. My role has increasingly become one of connecting those decisions: establishing the central idea and then working with architects, designers, operators, strategists, chefs, marketers, artists and collaborators to make sure that idea remains visible not necessarily literally, but emotionally as it moves from concept into reality.

In that sense, I am doing remarkably similar work to what I was doing twenty years ago. The canvas has simply become larger. Instead of considering how a story moves from fragrance to bottle to packaging to photography to retail, I am considering how an idea moves from positioning to architecture, interiors, digital, food, music, programming, service and ultimately into memory. Perhaps that is the simplest way I can explain what a brand means to me now. It is not a logo applied to a finished product. It is not the campaign created to sell the thing after it has been made. And it is certainly not a collection of aesthetic decisions masquerading as strategy. A brand is the thread running through all of it. It is the idea that connects what we say with what we make and, most importantly, with what people actually experience.

Twenty years ago, I was trying to put that feeling into a bottle. Today, I am trying to build spaces where you can walk inside it.

Photo: C.2012 Japan, Tokyo launch of DayNa Decker in Isetan. (We created brand fanatics, not just fans.)