Aesop doesn't allow blue pens in its stores.
Not blue. Not green. Not the perfectly respectable burgundy one someone brought from home. Black pens only.
It’s a wonderfully specific rule - and very Aesop. This is a company that governs its brand details closely enough that you can recognize its packaging, products, and stores almost anywhere in the world. Nothing feels accidental. Even the pen tucked behind the register has been considered.
And yet, every Aesop store looks totally unique.
Its Downtown Los Angeles store was built using cardboard garment tubes sourced from the surrounding Fashion District. In Busan, the walls draw from giwa, the traditional clay tiles used on Korean roofs. Each is a small site-specific installation, using different architects, materials, and visual logic. Every store belongs to its neighborhood, and at the same time is unmistakably Aesop.
So how are both of these things true?
Aesop exercises extraordinary control over its identity while leaving meaningful room for interpretation. It knows precisely what must remain consistent, and what becomes more powerful when it changes.
What are we actually trying to control?
There are rules that govern a brand’s expression: its typography, packaging, labeling, color, sound, and sensory experience. These are the recognizable signals that tell us who is speaking. They establish the boundaries within which the brand remains itself.
The black pen belongs to this category.
And these types of expression rules work beautifully when the situation is familiar and the answer is already known. They become less useful (or at least slightly more panic-inducing) when a team encounters a new market, channel, audience, or technology that the original guidelines never anticipated.
That is where a second kind of rule matters: the kind that helps people make decisions.
For Aesop, one of those decision principles appears to be a serious commitment to place. A store shouldn’t arrive in a city and simply impose a global template upon it. It should pay attention to its surroundings. It should understand the materials, history, and architecture already there - and create an expression of Aesop that could only exist in that location.
Busan isn’t asked to accommodate a preexisting Aesop store concept. The more interesting question is asked instead: What does Aesop become when it inhabits Busan?
I think that is a far more generous form of consistency. It protects the character of the brand without flattening the character of the place. It lives in the quality of attention Aesop brings to each place, which is why the stores can differ so completely without feeling disconnected.
A record of the past is not a strategy for the future
Most brand guidelines are very good at documenting decisions that have already been made: here are the colors we used, here is the type hierarchy, here are six examples of approved photography, here is the required clear space around the logo.
There’s a good reason for all that specificity - we add it to all our brand guidelines too. A brand shared across hundreds (or thousands) of people needs standards, without sacrificing things like accessibility, production quality, or recognition that an organization has spent years building.
Where guidelines need to go further is in helping people understand how those decisions were made. A record of the past, however thorough, doesn’t necessarily prepare anyone to make the next call. Usually I see that become apparent whenever the brand encounters something its creators didn’t anticipate, which should happen often if a business is growing: a new market, changing cultural context, product evolution, communication needs, etc. can all throw a brand decisions into a strange place.
When a system preserves the outputs of the brand without preserving the reasoning behind them, teams usually respond to the unfamiliar in one of two ways.
The first is repetition.
Faced with a new problem, people return to the safety of what has already been approved. They reproduce the same compositions, the same imagery, and the same tone because those choices carry the reassuring evidence of having been right before. The result may be perfectly consistent on paper, yet less and less appropriate to the world around it. The brand remains recognizable, but recognition has begun to come at the expense of relevance.
The second is reinvention.
Here, teams recognize that the existing answers don’t quite fit, so they begin creating their own. The decisions may be thoughtful, even excellent, within each individual market or campaign. But when we put various pieces of work side by side, the connections become harder to see. Every piece has a convincing explanation, but together they no longer feel like the same organization.
Neither response comes from a lack of care. In fact, both are reasonable attempts to solve for something the brand system has failed to provide. One team protects consistency; the other protects context. Without a shared understanding of the brand’s deeper logic, they are left to choose between the two.
This is what Aesop’s approach accounts for so well. The system doesn’t only preserve a collection of successful expressions; it gives people principles through which they can understand why those expressions were right; and recognize when an entirely different expression might be right for the same reason.
An example tells us, “This is what we did.” A principle lets us carry the intelligence of that decision into a situation we have never seen before.
Brand governance should create judgment
That ability to make the next decision is a part of brand governance that isn’t always articulated in brand guidelines.
Guidelines have traditionally been built to create compliance, which makes sense: they establish boundaries, reduce unnecessary debate, and keep every new project from becoming an existential conversation about what the brand is. But a company cannot scale its identity by teaching people only how to follow instructions. Eventually, someone will find themselves in a situation for which no instruction was written.
At that point, the strength of the brand depends on judgment.
This is sometimes described as creative freedom, although freedom isn’t quite the goal. Give ten teams permission to interpret the brand however they like and you will certainly get variety, although what you may not get is a brand. I think a more useful ambition is informed variation: work that can respond honestly to its context because the people creating it share a clear understanding of the point of view beneath it.
For a global organization (like Aesop, but also like many others I’ve had an honor of working with over the years), this distinction is especially important. Local relevance cannot be created by sending identical assets into every market and changing the language in the headline. At the same time, coherence cannot depend on each regional team reconstructing the organization’s identity from first principles.
This is why the familiar debate between centralization and decentralization tends to miss the more consequential question. It is not really a matter of deciding how much control headquarters should keep. I’ve found the more useful question to be, what genuinely requires control, and whether people have a strong enough basis for judgment everywhere else
A useful brand system should make that distinction visible. It should define the expression rules that protect recognition, quality, and accessibility, while also articulating the principles that guide less predictable decisions: what the brand pays attention to, what it values enough to protect, how it enters a new context, and what it would never do simply because the opportunity was available.
When those principles are understood, different agencies, teams, and markets can create work that doesn’t necessarily look alike but still feels as though it comes from the same mind. The organization gains room to evolve without asking its identity to dissolve every time it encounters something new.
The black pen still matters. Details accumulate, until one day they are the reason someone recognizes you from across the room.
But the greater achievement is not getting every person in every store to reach for the same pen. It is building a company that understands what the black pen was meant to preserve, and knows when the next right decision may not look anything like the last one.
