Original Form

You see it clearly. You’ve identified what makes the brand different and articulated it with precision and purpose. And then, you watch it get folded into a pyramid, a table, a beam and columns, a generic diagram – the same framework every other brand already lives in. The clarity crumples a little as you force it in. A progressive vision let down by a hackneyed model before it had a chance to be otherwise.

These structures feel neat, ordered, complete. But a diagram can be a way to look strategic, rather than apply strategy. Worse, the wrong framework is actively dangerous, it can flatten what’s distinctive.

At the studio, we’ve been mounting a quiet resistance to off-the-shelf formulas, and it’s through our portfolio strategy and brand architecture projects that this becomes most structural and concrete. Strategies worth their salt are useful and individual, they direct and generate bespoke expression. A portfolio diagram or brand architecture is pivotal because it is often a strategy’s first artefact. A leap into form. Its job is to describe roles and relationships between entities that make up a brand; to group, to prioritise, to frame, and to do so in an immediate and visual way.

The very name “brand architecture” has us reciting modernism’s principle: form follows function. Like good students of the Bauhaus, we believe that the form of a thing should arise from its purpose, its nature, its content, and that there’s an honesty to this approach. Art and culture have long acknowledged, in different axioms, that form and content are interrelated.

A distinctive strategy will direct us towards inventive forms.

The Brazilian beauty brand Natura is original in all it does, so we want to ensure our strategy for them is too. Natura is one of the world’s most quietly radical businesses. Their philosophy of well-being-well highlights the interdependence of people and planet. Beauty, for Natura, is relational; it begins with the self and expands outward to others and to the world. And while Natura is technically a masterbrand, it doesn’t behave like one. This demands that we abandon man-made models and top-down hierarchies in favour of natural metaphors – structures that are as nurturing, life-giving and relational as the brand itself.

For Winsor & Newton, a British heritage brand and one of the world’s authorities on colour, we drew inspiration from colour theory itself, the foundation of their craft. The portfolio will be painted by their in-house artist.

Neither of these was a stylistic choice. Both were strategic ones. Form is not neutral. It frames, emphasises, distorts and amplifies. It participates in meaning-making. A story told as a novel is not the same story when told as a film. When form and content are in harmony, each strengthens the other. When they are misaligned, meaning fractures.

Every word and every mark has a reason to be – that's our stubbornness. And as Katy will pick up in the next Here 20 article, being original in expression is not a hard choice. It's the most human one we can make.

Your strategy deserves a form of its own. Talk to us about brand architecture.