Brands that put design first

Design as the reason, not the finish

Almost every brand says it cares about design. In most companies that sentence describes a department. The product is defined by engineering, price and category, and design makes it presentable at the end. A small group of brands works the other way round. For them design decides what gets made at all, and if you took it away, nothing would remain that a customer could choose. Nothing, Aesop, teenage engineering, Polestar and Vitra belong to this group. Braun and Apple used to.

The interesting questions are not whether their products look good. They are why a company would bet everything on design, whether that is a sound strategy, and why the brands that defined design-first for decades no longer qualify.

Why they do it

Because design is the one form of communication that comes with the product. Aesop has built a global brand without conventional advertising.¹ Nothing previewed its first phone at Art Basel, not at a trade show, with Carl Pei saying that "all the artists had left the industry."² teenage engineering introduced itself in 2009 with a single synthesiser shown under glass.³ None of these brands had the budget to buy attention in a saturated category. They made objects that earned it.

There is a second reason, and it is the stronger one. Design-first brands enter their categories with distinctive assets from the first day. In Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow, brands are bought when they come to mind easily and often, and memory is built through assets such as colours, logos and typefaces that are recognisable and linked to the brand.⁴ Jenni Romaniuk has made the building and protection of such assets a discipline of its own.⁵ Most brands spend years and large budgets acquiring them. A design-first brand starts with an amber bottle, a transparent back or a star without its square, and every product it sells reinforces them.

Is it a good strategy?

For getting in, yes. For staying in, only under conditions. Design is the most visible part of a brand, which is exactly why it works and exactly why it is fragile. What can be seen can be copied. A style alone protects nothing. It only becomes a strategic asset when it is anchored in memory as belonging to one brand, and when the company keeps making decisions from it rather than about it.

For the brand this has a clear consequence: every product decision is a brand decision. That is why design-first brands tend to have designers or design-led founders at the top. Polestar's first chief executive was Volvo's head of design.⁶ teenage engineering's founder Jesper Kouthoofd now says the company will stop making synthesisers altogether, because "for us, the products aren't the business."⁷ Only a company whose identity lies in its way of designing can leave behind the product category that made it famous.

No compromises, and what they cost

Thinking design-first has a consequence that is easy to underestimate. It does not allow compromises, because design-first is not a property of the product. It is a promise that every touchpoint has to keep. The brand is only as design-first as its weakest touchpoint. One generic store, one standard trade-show stand, one off-the-shelf press release, and the customer learns that the design was a surface after all. That is why all of these brands carry their design philosophy into every field and every detail. They have no choice.

Aesop applies it to architecture. Dennis Paphitis never wanted "a standard Aesop shade of orange or green that was plastered onto stores with a nasty logo over it", and the company commissions a different architect for nearly every store.⁸ Polestar applies it to partners. Even a moped carries a frame in matt Polestar Snow and an Öhlins damper, and a boat carries hydrofoils in Polestar Gold.⁹¹⁰ Nothing applies it to communication. Its first phone was previewed at an art fair, the first 100 serialised units were auctioned, the launch was staged as "Return to Instinct", and the company answers its critics in its own YouTube videos instead of through statements.²¹¹¹² teenage engineering applies it even to a product for the mass market: its FREKVENS range for IKEA reached the shelves nearly two years after its first preview.¹³

This is where it gets expensive, and quickly. A brand without compromises gives up the economies of scale that everyone else lives on. Every store is a new commission instead of a rollout. Every collaboration has to be designed to the brand's standard, which narrows the choice of partners and ties the brand to their fate; CAKE, Polestar's partner for the Makka edition, filed for insolvency in 2024.¹⁴ Every launch is a production rather than an announcement. And every uncompromising product decision may need a second version for those who will not follow it, as Polestar's rear window shows.¹⁵ These costs do not fall once. They recur with every store, every product and every campaign, and they grow with the brand.

For the brand, this means two things. It needs an owner willing to pay for consistency that a spreadsheet cannot justify item by item. And it has to treat the cost as the price of its position, not as inefficiency. The moment a design-first brand starts to economise on a single touchpoint, it is no longer design-first, and the customer notices before the balance sheet does.

Why Braun and Apple no longer qualify

Braun and Apple show what happens next. Dieter Rams led design at Braun from 1961 and left in 1997.¹⁶ Braun became part of Gillette and then of Procter & Gamble, sold its kitchen appliances to De'Longhi in 2012 and today concentrates on shaving, grooming, beauty and hair care.¹⁷ Apple took its design cues from Braun so openly that its products paid tribute to Rams, and Jony Ive, the designer most associated with that era, left Apple in 2019.¹⁶¹⁸

Two forces did this, and neither is a failure of taste. The first is growth. Beyond a certain size a brand has to reach the masses to keep growing. Sharp's work puts it bluntly: the battle for market share is won or lost with light buyers, and the goal is "to recruit as many customers as possible."⁴ A design that has to please hundreds of millions of people can no longer polarise. It becomes good, safe and agreeable, and agreeable is not a reason to choose.

The second force is success itself. A design that wins leaves the niche and becomes the reference everyone else works from. Apple learned this from both sides. It borrowed from Braun, and then went to court against Samsung over the shape of a smartphone, a thin rectangle with rounded corners, winning a jury verdict of 1.049 billion US dollars in 2012.¹⁹ By then the shape was everywhere. When the whole category looks like you, your design stops being distinctive. It has become the standard. Braun and Apple still make well-designed products, but design is no longer why people choose them. Apple competes on its ecosystem today, Braun on its categories.

Do you have to stay niche?

No, but you have to protect the core while you grow. The current design-first brands show three ways of doing that.

The first is a second brand. Nothing launched CMF by Nothing in 2023 as an affordable line with its own team, while Nothing itself stays focused on premium products.²⁰ Volume goes to the sub-brand, the polarising design stays with the parent.

The second is a parallel variant. Polestar keeps the windowless coupé and adds a Polestar 4 SUV with a rear window for buyers who want one.¹⁵ At the same time the brand is openly aiming wider: its chief executive says Polestar is "targeting the heart of the EV market, where customer demand and profit pools are high."²¹ That is exactly the pressure that changed Braun and Apple, and Polestar's answer, more colour, more buttons and a "bold evolution" of its design, is an attempt to grow without becoming agreeable.²²

The third is to choose the niche deliberately. Vitra, founded in 1950, has stayed a design brand for 75 years and turned its factory site in Weil am Rhein into a campus with buildings by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando.²³ teenage engineering is moving in the same direction by leaving its best-known products behind. Aesop is the open case. Under L'Oréal it is expected to join the group's "Billionaire Brands" club.²⁴ Whether a brand of a different architect for nearly every store can scale to that size without becoming a chain is the question its next decade will answer.⁸

Can you change your form language?

Yes, but not your assets. The distinction matters. Expression may evolve: materials, colours, proportions, even product categories. The assets that carry the brand in memory may not. Aesop moved its tubes to recycled aluminium without changing how its packaging looks.²⁵ Polestar keeps its Dual Blade headlights while integrating them into a new front.²² A brand that drops its assets for a fresher look throws away the one thing that made design worth putting first. That is what the wave of flattened, interchangeable logos of recent years did to many brands, and why several are now reversing it.

Holding everything constant is no answer either. A form language that never moves turns into heritage, and heritage is something a brand looks back at, not something it decides from. The art is to change enough that the design still leads, and little enough that it is still recognisably yours.

What they share, and what they do not

All five share three things. They own distinctive assets that come from the product itself: the amber bottle, the transparent back, the colour-coded encoders of the OP-1, the star and the Dual Blade lights, the campus.^252262223 They let the product do the advertising. And design sits where the decisions are made.

They differ in almost everything else. Nothing and teenage engineering are led by their founders; Aesop belongs to L'Oréal, and Polestar's majority shareholder is Geely.²⁴²⁷ teenage engineering lends its design to others, from IKEA to Nothing; Aesop keeps its design to itself.²⁸²⁹ And their distinctiveness has different roots. Sharp advises brands to aim for "meaningless distinctiveness, rather than meaningful differentiation."⁴ Aesop's amber glass protects its ingredients from light, and Polestar's missing rear window gives rear passengers more headroom.²⁵³⁰ Their design means something. That is their real advantage over a logo, and their real risk: a reason can be copied faster than a memory.

Design-first is not a style. It is a decision about who leads. As long as design sits at the top table, it sets the direction. Once it moves into a department, it becomes what it is everywhere else: the finish.