I need to tell you why beautiful brands aren’t enough anymore.
When aesthetics are perfect. The typography, the palette, the "elevated minimalism" that looks like every other wellness or beauty brand on Instagram. It's gorgeous. But it's all icing, no flavour. And people can tell.
They take one bite, one interaction with the brand, and they don't come back. Not because it looks bad. Because it tastes like nothing.
Or worse: it tastes like everyone else.
After 10 years of watching founders rebrand their way into irrelevance, I've learned this: You can't decorate your way to a memorable brand.
You have to bake something with a rich flavour first.
(WARNING: You might feel a slight craving for a slice of cake by the end of this post)
What is rich flavour branding?
Think about the brands you actually remember. The ones you recommend without being asked. The ones you'd miss if they disappeared.
Aesop. Byredo. Glossier (before they became generic). Susanne Kaufmann.
Strip away their logos, their packaging, their carefully curated Instagram grids.
You'd still know who they are.
Because they have a rich flavour.
Not just a pretty presentation. Not just good ingredients. But a distinct taste, a combination of culture, codes, philosophy, and world-building that's impossible to replicate.
That's what I mean by Rich Flavour Branding.
It's the depth that makes people come back for another bite.
It's the cultural substance beneath the aesthetic surface.
It's what separates a brand from decorated noise.
The culture + branding equation
Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
Think about Peggy Gou. Her world is nightlife, techno, high fashion, global culture, playful energy. Her flavour? Effortless futurism with 90s nostalgia.
If she launched a brand or event, you wouldn't call it "Peggy's Nightlife Company."
You'd call it something like "Gou.0"
Tech-forward. Playful. A nod to evolution (2.0, 3.0) while being distinctly her. The name itself carries cultural weight.
That's Rich Flavour Branding.
The culture (her world, codes, flavour profile) comes first.
The branding (Gou.0, the visual language, the experience) translates it.
One without the other is incomplete.
Culture without branding? Invisible.
Branding without culture? All icing, no flavour.
The cake test
Here's the thing about cakes:
You can have the most spectacular icing in the world, smooth, flawless, Instagram-perfect. Little edible flowers. Minimalist. Elevated. But if the cake itself is dry? Flavorless? One-note? People stop after the first bite.
Your brand is the same.
The icing (your visual identity, your aesthetic, your "vibe") is important. God, is it important. It's what makes people want to try you in the first place.
But the cake (your culture, your codes, your rich flavour) is what makes them come back.
And here's what I've watched happen for 10 years:
Founders spend months obsessing over the icing. Getting the colours just right. The typography is perfectly kerned. The mood board is absolutely elevated.
And they haven't baked the cake yet.
They don't know:
What their actual flavour is (not what they wish it was)
What ingredients make them distinct
What cultural codes they are working with
Where they belong (not where Instagram says they should)
So they launch this beautiful brand with no substance.
And six months later, they're rebranding again because the icing didn't fix the missing flavour.
What I learned watching founders rebrand on repeat
I spent a decade as a designer. Same product, day after day. Same user flows, same interfaces, same problems on repeat. And I watched founders rebrand constantly.
New logo. New colours. New "energy." They'd spend six months and five figures making everything perfect. Launch day: Beautiful deck. Gorgeous website.
And then... nothing changed.
Because the rebrand didn't add flavour to a bland product.
The culture was still undefined.
The positioning was still confused.
They still didn't know what made them distinct.
A new logo doesn't bake rich flavour into a brand that has none.
I realised: I didn't want to keep icing the same flavourless cakes. I wanted to work across cultures, industries and creative dimensions. With founders building brands that tasted like something. So I left tech.
And now I'm seeing European wellness and beauty founders make the exact same mistake. Beautiful brands. No distinct flavour.
How to bake rich flavour (the mastery)
So what does "baking rich flavour" actually look like?
It's not sexy. It doesn't photograph well. But it's the only thing that works.
It looks like:
The founder, who spent six months in a Facebook group for eczema parents, just listening, before ever mentioning her soap company
47 DMs to potential customers asking about their actual lives, not just their skincare routines
Reformulating your serum four times because your first customers told you it pilled
The ceramics studio, which learned that their customers didn't want "elevated minimalism”, but instead wanted weird, irregular bowls that felt like coming home
Answering the same question 100 times and realising the question itself is teaching you about your flavour
This is how you discover:
Your actual flavour profile (not the one you borrowed from Aesop)
Your cultural codes (what makes you YOU, not just pretty)
Where you belong (the specific niche only you can own)
What ingredients combine to create something unreplicable
This is the recipe for Rich Flavour Branding.
And it takes time. Months. Sometimes years.
But once you have it? That's when the branding becomes powerful.
Because now you're not just icing a generic cake. You're translating something with real depth, real flavour, real cultural substance.
Now "Macbook" makes sense instead of "Apple Laptop."
Now "Gou.0" carries weight.
Now your visual identity isn't decoration, it's an expression of something true.
The Aesop test
Go to Aesop's website. Now mentally remove:
The logo
The product packaging
The typeface
What's left?
The refusal to use the word "skincare" (it's "skin")
Literary references in product descriptions (Borges, Kawabata, Baldwin)
Store design as spiritual practice
The specific brown bottles (colour as code, not decoration)
The ritual of hand-washingis reframed as worthwhile time
Staff trained in poetry, not product pushing
You still know it's Aesop.
Because their branding is the perfect translation of their culture. Those brown apothecary bottles? That's not just aesthetic. That's a cultural code: pharmaceutical meets poetic. Function meets ritual.
The literary references? Not decoration. That's their belief system: that caring for your skin can be intellectually engaging.
The store design? Not just pretty. That's their philosophy made spatial: slow down, this matters, you're worth the time.
This is what happens when culture and branding are built together.
Not one, then the other. Together. Now run the test on your brand.
Remove your logo, your colour palette, your carefully curated Instagram grid. What's left? If the answer is "...not much," that's not a design problem.
That's a flavour problem.
And you can't design your way out of a flavour problem.
Both matter, but sequence is everything
Let me be clear: branding matters.
Names carry cultural weight. Visual identity is the vehicle for your world. The right aesthetic can crystallise years of culture-building into an instant feeling.
But branding only works when there's rich flavour to translate.
So before you book the brand designer (and eventually, you should):
Bake the cake first.
Develop your flavour profile.
Understand your cultural codes.
Build something real with real people.
Create the substance you want your branding to express.
Then, and only then, find someone who can present it beautifully.
Someone who understands their job isn't to make you look like everyone else's idea of "elevated."
Their job is to make your rich flavour visible.
To translate your world into visual language.
To create a presentation that makes people want to taste what you spent years perfecting.
The question for 2026
In 2026, the question isn't: "Should I rebrand?"
The question is: "Does my brand have rich flavour or just pretty icing?"
If you have rich flavour, if you know your codes, your world, your distinct taste, then hell yes, invest in beautiful branding that expresses it.
If you don't? Get back in the kitchen.
The icing can wait.
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