What Happens When Feeling Is the Strategy
A visit to the Aesop Collins Street store - and what 37 years of intentional design, extraordinary architecture, and sensory intelligence actually does to a person.
I wasn't even planning to go in.
A few months back I was doing that thing you do on Collins Street on a Tuesday afternoon – somewhere to be, coffee in one hand (of course), most likely late. And then I suddenly found myself stopped at a doorway. I looked up and saw a beautiful domed ceiling through the front window that made me audibly gasp. Having not been to this particular location, yet somehow knowing exactly where I was - I suddenly remembered... My Aesop Rejuvenate Intensive Body Balm - my absolute ride-or-die, the one I've been using for years and keep coming back to - was almost out. And there was the store, right there, as if it knew. The plan: grab the balm, out in five minutes.
It was not five minutes, it never is. One step off the footpath and I was somewhere else entirely. The noise of the city dropped away. My pace slowed, not because I decided to slow down, but because the space asked me to. My breathing slowed without realising it. As my adrenaline eased, my senses suddenly woke up, noticing the details we’re usually too busy to notice. It's funny what happens when your nervous system finally exhales.
When we're in a constant state of busyness, we don't stop using our senses - we simply stop paying attention to them. Calm creates the space for them to become conscious again.
I left eventually, in a dreamy daze, with my body balm. And I've been thinking about that visit ever since. Not about the balm (although, it’s great too). About what actually happened that day, in that store.
For anyone who's somehow managed to avoid Aesop entirely: it's an Australian skincare brand founded in 1987 by Dennis Paphitis, a Melbourne hairdresser who started blending essential oils in his Armadale salon. He named it after the ancient Greek storyteller - deliberately, as a quiet dig at an industry built on overblown claims and empty promises. Nearly four decades later, with almost 400 stores across 27 countries and an acquisition by L'Oréal for A$3.7 billion, the joke landed.
There are already plenty of articles about Aesop as a brand strategy case study - the anti-advertising philosophy, the cult following, the billion-dollar acquisition. All worth reading. But what I want to talk about is the brand experience itself. The specific visual and sensory decisions that engineer a very particular emotional response before you've consciously registered anything at all. The feels – this is what genuinely lights me up inside.
First, the room. Because the space is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The Collins Street store at 162 Collins, inside the historic Georges Building, was designed by Clare Cousins Architects and opened in 2023. If you know Clare Cousins' work at all, this makes complete sense. Her Melbourne practice has spent twenty years doing something very specific and really difficult: designing spaces that respond to where they are rather than imposing a preformed idea onto a site. The Stable & Cart House in North Melbourne. The MAAP headquarters in Port Melbourne. Courtyard House in Albert Park. Every project is a considered conversation between the building and its context, between the old and the contemporary, between restraint and warmth. The Aesop commission was, in that sense, a perfect fit.
The brief: make it feel completely like Aesop, while also making it feel like it could only ever exist here, on this particular street, in this particular city. And so the CCA team looked to the neighbouring buildings for inspiration.
A few blocks north is the State Library of Victoria - you know that divine domed reading room where octagonal walls rise floor to ceiling lined with books and everyone instinctively whispers. The store is, quite deliberately, in quiet conversation with it. The ceiling vaults high and dramatically - Clare Cousins' own website describes it as lending "a dramatic street presence" while creating "a respectful dialogue with the building's façade." Its grainy surface is coated in salvaged, crushed Aesop bottles mixed into the render (I know, how incredible right!), Australian Blackbutt timber - warm, golden-brown, slightly honeyed - wraps the curved perimeter in a continuous sequence of stained joinery. Travertine forms the benches and covers the ground in offcuts, each piece different from the next.
On one side of the store, amber vessels stand on generous shelves exactly where books would be. On the other, timber-shrouded individual basins sit beneath low, warm light, each one shaped like a writing desk. A fragrance wardrobe along one wall. And the scent, that particular Aesop scent, herbaceous and earthy, bergamot and rosemary and something greener underneath, that hits you the moment you step in and doesn't let go.
Together, these materials - the crushed glass ceiling, the warm timber, the cool travertine underfoot, the amber light, the smell - create a room that doesn't just look beautiful. It changes how your body responds inside it.
And it makes sense as here's the psychology of that. Research into multisensory environments consistently shows that when multiple senses are engaged simultaneously and in harmony - what researchers call sensory congruency - the emotional impact is significantly amplified. You don't just feel good; you feel it more deeply, and you remember it longer. The scent alone is activating your limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for emotion and memory, before you've read a label or touched a product. The travertine stone underfoot is adding weight and solidity - literally grounding you. The vaulted ceiling is telling your nervous system you're somewhere significant. And all of it together is slowing you down in a way that a flat white ceiling and vinyl flooring simply cannot.
You don't rush in spaces like this. You don't skim. You pay attention. Which means that by the time you pick up a product, you're in a completely different cognitive state than you would be anywhere else. The architecture has already done most of the work.
The scent hits you the moment you step in. Your limbic system fires before your brain has caught up. The room has already made its case.
That amber bottle is working overtime and asking for no credit.
Before you've read a single word, before anyone's said hello, before you've consciously registered the name above the door, you see the amber. Row after row of it, warm and honey-coloured, catching the low light just so. And something in your brain - the ancient, pre-rational part that formed opinions about things long before language existed - has already decided.
Warm amber tones carry centuries of coding. Apothecary jars. Preserved specimens. Old medicine. Things that have been here long enough to be trusted. The colour communicates, without communicating: someone who knew what they were doing made this. This has been here a while. You're in good hands.
Architecture Now noted that the amber bottle has been essentially unchanged since Aesop launched in 1987! Meanwhile, dozens of brands have tried to copy it since. But the brands copying the bottle are missing something fundamental. You can replicate the form, but you cannot replicate the context. That same bottle in a different store, on a different shelf, under different light communicates something completely different. In Collins Street it exists inside a system - the finishes, the herbaceous scent, the low light. Every element reinforces every other. The psychology research calls this sensory congruency: when all the cues point in the same direction, the emotional response doesn't just add up, it multiplies. The feeling of trust builds on itself until it's bypassed your rational brain entirely.
You don't decide to trust it. You just do. And that, is impressive.
The label that doesn't try to win you over but wins you over completely.
Pick up a product and look at the label properly. The typeface is Optima on the logo, Neue Helvetica across the packaging - clean, upright, completely undecorated. Nothing that exists purely to charm you. No calligraphy, no gilded edge, no promise of luminosity in italics.
In a beauty industry where almost everything is wrapped in romantic script and aspirational language, that plainness lands like a statement. It reads as confidence. Most beauty labels are performing, they want you to notice how appealing they look, to be won over by the prettiness of the packaging before you've read a word. Aesop's type just states. And in context, stating is more persuasive than performing.
The copy itself is long, informative, and genuinely useful. Botanical ingredients listed in full. Usage instructions written for someone who's actually going to read them. No claim about how you'll look or feel or be perceived by others. Just: here's what this is, here's what's in it, here's what to do with it.
There's a concept in psychology called epistemic trust - our tendency to believe information from a source that doesn't appear to be trying to manipulate us. Aesop's labels read like they belong on a laboratory shelf, not a beauty counter. And that is exactly why we believe every word on them. It's the typographic equivalent of someone giving you advice they clearly don't need you to take.
The part that really gets me though: no two stores look the same.
Every single Aesop location is designed from scratch. Not from a template, not from a brand rollout document that says replicate the last one. Every store is a response to its specific street, its neighbourhood, its building, its cultural moment. Dennis the founder told Dezeen he was "horrified at the thought of Aesop evolving into a soulless chain." So instead of the rational, scalable thing, he committed to genuine architectural singularity, every single time, everywhere.
A Kyoto location suspends amber bottles sideways like calligraphic scrolls. The Paris Le Marais store is lined with 427 polished-steel discs repurposed from the city's plumbing pipes. The Fitzroy store, also by Clare Cousins Architects (and also incredible) features large in-situ cast concrete vessels fitted with aged brass tapware, a nod to Fitzroy's early blacksmith industry, featuring blush pink hues paired with hand-painted soft green cabinetry elevated on slender legs. And Collins Street channels Melbourne's civic grandeur by entering into dialogue with the State Library a few blocks away.
Here's what gets me every time I think about this: you would recognise an Aesop store anywhere in the world without seeing the name on the door (I mean, even I did when walking past the Collins Street store that I had yet visited). Not because they look the same - because they don’t - but because they feel the same. The amber light. The quiet. The sense that whoever designed this space took it seriously. The quality of attention in the room. The scent that hits you before you've decided anything.
Most brands chase visual consistency - same colours, same fonts, same templates everywhere - and mistake that for having a real identity. What Aesop demonstrates is that identity lives somewhere much harder to replicate than a style guide. It lives in the values that shape every decision, even when those decisions produce wildly different outcomes. Consistency of feeling, not consistency of form.
That distinction is honestly, everything… especially when building a brand that's meant to have enduring impact.
You'd recognise an Aesop store anywhere without seeing the name on the door. Not because they look the same. Because they feel the same.
What they leave out is doing as much work as what they put in.
There are no models in Aesop's world. No before-and-after photography. No promises of radiance or transformation or youth. No celebrities. No sale event. No countdown timer. No urgency whatsoever.
The beauty industry runs almost entirely on manufactured aspiration and low-grade anxiety - the twin engines of most skincare marketing. Aesop switches both off completely. And what fills the space instead is something the industry almost never builds deliberately: trust.
Here's how the psychology of that works. When a brand makes a lot of claims, you factor in the motivation behind those claims. Of course they're saying it works, they need you to buy it. But when a brand shows you a beautifully made thing in a considered space and says relatively little about what it'll do for you, something different happens. You fill in the gaps yourself. Your own conclusion feels more reliable than theirs. The less they try to convince you, the more convinced you become.
Every empty wall. Every label that describes rather than promises. Every absence of a before-and-after. The silence where the marketing language would normally be. All of it is quietly saying the same thing: we don't need to persuade you. The thing itself is enough.
That, in my opinion, is an art.
And then you take it home.
This is the part I find most interesting. And most personal.
When you leave with something, and you almost always leave with something, even if you came in just to look, the experience doesn't stay in the store. The product travels with you. It sits on your bathroom shelf or your kitchen counter or your desk. And there, quietly, it becomes part of the story you tell about yourself.
An Aesop bottle is not a passive object. The design made sure of that. It signals something to anyone who sees it, including, importantly, you. Not really wealth exactly. More like discernment. A preference for considered things over convenient ones. The willingness to pay for something made properly rather than just made cheaply. And every time you reach for it, you're reminded of that moment in the store - the warmth of the amber light, the cool of the travertine under your feet, the particular scent that you now associate, without quite deciding to, with a version of yourself that slows down and pays attention.
That is sensory branding at its most sophisticated. It doesn't just live in the store. It comes home with you and keeps working. Which feels pretty extraordinary for something as simple as a hand cream.
But that's what I was thinking about as I finally left Collins Street that afternoon. This is what it looks like when the feeling is the strategy. When every visual decision, every material, every scent note, every typographic choice, every thing that's been left out - all of it is working in service of a single emotional outcome.
Not a product - a feeling.
What Happens When Feeling Is the Strategy
A visit to the Aesop Collins Street store - and what 37 years of intentional design, extraordinary architecture, and sensory intelligence actually does to a person.
I wasn't even planning to go in.
A few months back I was doing that thing you do on Collins Street on a Tuesday afternoon – somewhere to be, coffee in one hand (of course), most likely late. And then I suddenly found myself stopped at a doorway. I looked up and saw a beautiful domed ceiling through the front window that made me audibly gasp. Having not been to this particular location, yet somehow knowing exactly where I was - I suddenly remembered... My Aesop Rejuvenate Intensive Body Balm - my absolute ride-or-die, the one I've been using for years and keep coming back to - was almost out. And there was the store, right there, as if it knew. The plan: grab the balm, out in five minutes.
It was not five minutes, it never is. One step off the footpath and I was somewhere else entirely. The noise of the city dropped away. My pace slowed, not because I decided to slow down, but because the space asked me to. My breathing slowed without realising it. As my adrenaline eased, my senses suddenly woke up, noticing the details we’re usually too busy to notice. It's funny what happens when your nervous system finally exhales.
When we're in a constant state of busyness, we don't stop using our senses - we simply stop paying attention to them. Calm creates the space for them to become conscious again.
I left eventually, in a dreamy daze, with my body balm. And I've been thinking about that visit ever since. Not about the balm (although, it’s great too). About what actually happened that day, in that store.
For anyone who's somehow managed to avoid Aesop entirely: it's an Australian skincare brand founded in 1987 by Dennis Paphitis, a Melbourne hairdresser who started blending essential oils in his Armadale salon. He named it after the ancient Greek storyteller - deliberately, as a quiet dig at an industry built on overblown claims and empty promises. Nearly four decades later, with almost 400 stores across 27 countries and an acquisition by L'Oréal for A$3.7 billion, the joke landed.
There are already plenty of articles about Aesop as a brand strategy case study - the anti-advertising philosophy, the cult following, the billion-dollar acquisition. All worth reading. But what I want to talk about is the brand experience itself. The specific visual and sensory decisions that engineer a very particular emotional response before you've consciously registered anything at all. The feels – this is what genuinely lights me up inside.
First, the room. Because the space is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The Collins Street store at 162 Collins, inside the historic Georges Building, was designed by Clare Cousins Architects and opened in 2023. If you know Clare Cousins' work at all, this makes complete sense. Her Melbourne practice has spent twenty years doing something very specific and really difficult: designing spaces that respond to where they are rather than imposing a preformed idea onto a site. The Stable & Cart House in North Melbourne. The MAAP headquarters in Port Melbourne. Courtyard House in Albert Park. Every project is a considered conversation between the building and its context, between the old and the contemporary, between restraint and warmth. The Aesop commission was, in that sense, a perfect fit.
The brief: make it feel completely like Aesop, while also making it feel like it could only ever exist here, on this particular street, in this particular city. And so the CCA team looked to the neighbouring buildings for inspiration.
A few blocks north is the State Library of Victoria - you know that divine domed reading room where octagonal walls rise floor to ceiling lined with books and everyone instinctively whispers. The store is, quite deliberately, in quiet conversation with it. The ceiling vaults high and dramatically - Clare Cousins' own website describes it as lending "a dramatic street presence" while creating "a respectful dialogue with the building's façade." Its grainy surface is coated in salvaged, crushed Aesop bottles mixed into the render (I know, how incredible right!), Australian Blackbutt timber - warm, golden-brown, slightly honeyed - wraps the curved perimeter in a continuous sequence of stained joinery. Travertine forms the benches and covers the ground in offcuts, each piece different from the next.
On one side of the store, amber vessels stand on generous shelves exactly where books would be. On the other, timber-shrouded individual basins sit beneath low, warm light, each one shaped like a writing desk. A fragrance wardrobe along one wall. And the scent, that particular Aesop scent, herbaceous and earthy, bergamot and rosemary and something greener underneath, that hits you the moment you step in and doesn't let go.
Together, these materials - the crushed glass ceiling, the warm timber, the cool travertine underfoot, the amber light, the smell - create a room that doesn't just look beautiful. It changes how your body responds inside it.
And it makes sense as here's the psychology of that. Research into multisensory environments consistently shows that when multiple senses are engaged simultaneously and in harmony - what researchers call sensory congruency - the emotional impact is significantly amplified. You don't just feel good; you feel it more deeply, and you remember it longer. The scent alone is activating your limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for emotion and memory, before you've read a label or touched a product. The travertine stone underfoot is adding weight and solidity - literally grounding you. The vaulted ceiling is telling your nervous system you're somewhere significant. And all of it together is slowing you down in a way that a flat white ceiling and vinyl flooring simply cannot.
You don't rush in spaces like this. You don't skim. You pay attention. Which means that by the time you pick up a product, you're in a completely different cognitive state than you would be anywhere else. The architecture has already done most of the work.
The scent hits you the moment you step in. Your limbic system fires before your brain has caught up. The room has already made its case.
That amber bottle is working overtime and asking for no credit.
Before you've read a single word, before anyone's said hello, before you've consciously registered the name above the door, you see the amber. Row after row of it, warm and honey-coloured, catching the low light just so. And something in your brain - the ancient, pre-rational part that formed opinions about things long before language existed - has already decided.
Warm amber tones carry centuries of coding. Apothecary jars. Preserved specimens. Old medicine. Things that have been here long enough to be trusted. The colour communicates, without communicating: someone who knew what they were doing made this. This has been here a while. You're in good hands.
Architecture Now noted that the amber bottle has been essentially unchanged since Aesop launched in 1987! Meanwhile, dozens of brands have tried to copy it since. But the brands copying the bottle are missing something fundamental. You can replicate the form, but you cannot replicate the context. That same bottle in a different store, on a different shelf, under different light communicates something completely different. In Collins Street it exists inside a system - the finishes, the herbaceous scent, the low light. Every element reinforces every other. The psychology research calls this sensory congruency: when all the cues point in the same direction, the emotional response doesn't just add up, it multiplies. The feeling of trust builds on itself until it's bypassed your rational brain entirely.
You don't decide to trust it. You just do. And that, is impressive.
The label that doesn't try to win you over but wins you over completely.
Pick up a product and look at the label properly. The typeface is Optima on the logo, Neue Helvetica across the packaging - clean, upright, completely undecorated. Nothing that exists purely to charm you. No calligraphy, no gilded edge, no promise of luminosity in italics.
In a beauty industry where almost everything is wrapped in romantic script and aspirational language, that plainness lands like a statement. It reads as confidence. Most beauty labels are performing, they want you to notice how appealing they look, to be won over by the prettiness of the packaging before you've read a word. Aesop's type just states. And in context, stating is more persuasive than performing.
The copy itself is long, informative, and genuinely useful. Botanical ingredients listed in full. Usage instructions written for someone who's actually going to read them. No claim about how you'll look or feel or be perceived by others. Just: here's what this is, here's what's in it, here's what to do with it.
There's a concept in psychology called epistemic trust - our tendency to believe information from a source that doesn't appear to be trying to manipulate us. Aesop's labels read like they belong on a laboratory shelf, not a beauty counter. And that is exactly why we believe every word on them. It's the typographic equivalent of someone giving you advice they clearly don't need you to take.
The part that really gets me though: no two stores look the same.
Every single Aesop location is designed from scratch. Not from a template, not from a brand rollout document that says replicate the last one. Every store is a response to its specific street, its neighbourhood, its building, its cultural moment. Dennis the founder told Dezeen he was "horrified at the thought of Aesop evolving into a soulless chain." So instead of the rational, scalable thing, he committed to genuine architectural singularity, every single time, everywhere.
A Kyoto location suspends amber bottles sideways like calligraphic scrolls. The Paris Le Marais store is lined with 427 polished-steel discs repurposed from the city's plumbing pipes. The Fitzroy store, also by Clare Cousins Architects (and also incredible) features large in-situ cast concrete vessels fitted with aged brass tapware, a nod to Fitzroy's early blacksmith industry, featuring blush pink hues paired with hand-painted soft green cabinetry elevated on slender legs. And Collins Street channels Melbourne's civic grandeur by entering into dialogue with the State Library a few blocks away.
Here's what gets me every time I think about this: you would recognise an Aesop store anywhere in the world without seeing the name on the door (I mean, even I did when walking past the Collins Street store that I had yet visited). Not because they look the same - because they don’t - but because they feel the same. The amber light. The quiet. The sense that whoever designed this space took it seriously. The quality of attention in the room. The scent that hits you before you've decided anything.
Most brands chase visual consistency - same colours, same fonts, same templates everywhere - and mistake that for having a real identity. What Aesop demonstrates is that identity lives somewhere much harder to replicate than a style guide. It lives in the values that shape every decision, even when those decisions produce wildly different outcomes. Consistency of feeling, not consistency of form.
That distinction is honestly, everything… especially when building a brand that's meant to have enduring impact.
You'd recognise an Aesop store anywhere without seeing the name on the door. Not because they look the same. Because they feel the same.
What they leave out is doing as much work as what they put in.
There are no models in Aesop's world. No before-and-after photography. No promises of radiance or transformation or youth. No celebrities. No sale event. No countdown timer. No urgency whatsoever.
The beauty industry runs almost entirely on manufactured aspiration and low-grade anxiety - the twin engines of most skincare marketing. Aesop switches both off completely. And what fills the space instead is something the industry almost never builds deliberately: trust.
Here's how the psychology of that works. When a brand makes a lot of claims, you factor in the motivation behind those claims. Of course they're saying it works, they need you to buy it. But when a brand shows you a beautifully made thing in a considered space and says relatively little about what it'll do for you, something different happens. You fill in the gaps yourself. Your own conclusion feels more reliable than theirs. The less they try to convince you, the more convinced you become.
Every empty wall. Every label that describes rather than promises. Every absence of a before-and-after. The silence where the marketing language would normally be. All of it is quietly saying the same thing: we don't need to persuade you. The thing itself is enough.
That, in my opinion, is an art.
And then you take it home.
This is the part I find most interesting. And most personal.
When you leave with something, and you almost always leave with something, even if you came in just to look, the experience doesn't stay in the store. The product travels with you. It sits on your bathroom shelf or your kitchen counter or your desk. And there, quietly, it becomes part of the story you tell about yourself.
An Aesop bottle is not a passive object. The design made sure of that. It signals something to anyone who sees it, including, importantly, you. Not really wealth exactly. More like discernment. A preference for considered things over convenient ones. The willingness to pay for something made properly rather than just made cheaply. And every time you reach for it, you're reminded of that moment in the store - the warmth of the amber light, the cool of the travertine under your feet, the particular scent that you now associate, without quite deciding to, with a version of yourself that slows down and pays attention.
That is sensory branding at its most sophisticated. It doesn't just live in the store. It comes home with you and keeps working. Which feels pretty extraordinary for something as simple as a hand cream.
But that's what I was thinking about as I finally left Collins Street that afternoon. This is what it looks like when the feeling is the strategy. When every visual decision, every material, every scent note, every typographic choice, every thing that's been left out - all of it is working in service of a single emotional outcome.
Not a product - a feeling.
Seen. Not Heard. The Missing Sense in Your Brand Strategy.
What episodic memory, a Cirque du Soleil soundtrack, and your brand have in common.
Have you ever had your senses completely hijacked, and loved every second of it? Enter, Cirque du Soleil - one of the most renowned live entertainment brands in the world. For those that haven’t been, this is not just a show. It’s an entire sensory experience that invites you to step inside it.
We recently took our two young girls to see the latest show visiting Melbourne, Kooza, for their first proper circus experience. (I know, we couldn’t exactly start with a basic local circus, could we… Where to from here?)
Safe to say they loved it. We all did. Who am I kidding – it was unbelievable. Edge of your seat, jaw-on-the-floor entertainment.
And so, in the weeks that followed, the kids did what all young kids do after an experience that really lands – they deep-dived and obsessed over everything circus related. (Or is that just mine?) In the car they asked if we could listen to “Kooza music”. A quick Spotify search confirmed there’s a full soundtrack. And we played it… as requested, on repeat. Parents - if you know, you know. It’s fun the first few times. After that, you start quietly losing the will to live.
Listening to the playlist after a few days, I thought I may as well have some fun with it. So I told the kids I was going to test them, to see if they could remember which song went with which act from the day. Now, it was a long show with lots of different acts. I was amazed they sat through it all to be honest, but I came prepared with snacks and like I said, it was an epic show, so they were engaged throughout.
Honestly, I couldn’t pin most of the songs myself. (On a good day I struggle to remember what I had for breakfast!) But most of them were instrumental and I remember being so floored by the acts that that’s clearly where my focus was.
The car game that genuinely stopped me.
The first song comes up. Before I’ve even finished asking, my eldest pipes up: “yep, this is the song from the lady who did the thing in the air with the stretchy red ribbons”. I paused, trying to recall it myself, but I couldn’t place it. I challenged her – really, are you sure? She said: “yep. I remember the red ribbons”. (Apparently they’re called aerial silks, I’ve since learnt.)
My youngest chimes in: “yeah, it is, Mum”. I could hear in her voice she had absolutely no idea and was just following along, but this is my sassy one, and she loves nothing more than proving me wrong.
Ok, I thought. Next one, she’ll be stumped. The song comes on. She says: “this was the song when the man was standing on the long sticks doing flips on the jumpy board thing”. I’m shocked. I can’t quite recall it myself, but the way she’s answering with such confidence has me believing her.
Seeing my reaction, she was very happy with how good she was at this game.
Third song. I don’t recognise the start of it, but then my eldest says: Mum, this was the part where you got really scared. Remember?
Oh yes, it all started coming back to me.
The Wheel of Death. If you need a visual, here it is – it's exactly what it sounds like. Eight and half minutes I promise you won’t regret. And watch till the end because every time you think the stunt can't possibly go further, they outdo it.
So, it’s two enormous cylinders on a spinning structure. Two performers, jump inside a cylinder each and run to start getting it spinning, at speed. That alone had me impressed. They then each climb to the outside of their cylinder while the whole thing is rotating, fast, high in the air, with no nets below. They start running on the outside of them and then even eventually start skipping, with a rope. Yes, I know.
I don’t know about you, but once you get older or become a parent, you see these things really differently. When I was younger I was the daredevil type – no fear, loved fast rides. Now, watching a stunt like this, you’re like oh my gosh - this is so dangerous! Clearly, I’m showing my age…
On the day it had me sitting on the edge of my seat, desperately needing a hand to squeeze – so I grabbed my eldest’s, and she was laughing at me because I was absolutely not coping.
As the song played in the car, it reached a section with a particular rhythm and a set of distinctive background vocals – and the feeling came back. Not a memory of the feeling. The actual feeling. The fear. The awe. The I-can't-watch-this-but-I-can’t-look-away. Sitting in my car, I felt the same way I had sitting in that tent watching those performers.
A piece of music had transported me back to a specific moment, a specific emotion, from a single experience, weeks earlier.
Next song. My youngest jumps in: “Mummy, this is the song with the clowns I liked. Remember, they were throwing popcorn at the people in the front seats, and then they were trying to get the king’s crown but kept getting electrocuted”. (For context, they were mimes – nobody was actually electrocuted!)
And once again, I sat there stunned. Because I couldn’t quite place it, just like the other songs.
When I got home, I went back through the videos I’d taken on the day (if you know me, you know I captured a lot of content), and every guess they had made checked out. They had correctly matched acts to songs from a show they'd seen once, weeks before, with approximately one thousand things happening simultaneously.
Happen to you all the time too?
I know what you’re thinking - we’ve all been there. An old song comes on the radio and sends you straight back to a moment in your life. Nostalgia. Love it.
But here’s the distinction. Nostalgia typically works because you’ve heard those songs many, many times. The music and the memory get intertwined through repetition. My 4 and 6 year old girls had heard this music exactly once. In a tent, surrounded by acrobats and clowns, with an enormous amount of competing sensory input. And yet it had encoded itself so precisely that they could use it as a key to unlock a specific moment weeks later, with complete accuracy.
How were they able to so clearly remember these tunes just from watching the show once, with so much going on at the same time? I remember leaving thinking: will they even remember this? They better – we paid enough for it!
It’s not nostalgia. It’s something more specific, and this little game/experiment had me intrigued. There’s a concept called episodic memory: our ability to recall not just information, but the full experience of being in a particular moment. The sights, the sounds, the feelings. All of it. And music, it turns out, is one of the most powerful triggers for it we have. Researchers describe it as a kind of ‘feeling of knowing’ – that almost involuntary rush of being transported back to exactly how something felt, not just what happened. The reason it works so deep is that emotional experiences pull in the limbic system – the part of the brain that handles both how we feel and what we remember. The two are wired together.
Which is why a specific beat in a car can put you right back in a tent, gripping your child’s hand, jaw on the floor.
And here’s what clicked for me: when the music and the experience are designed together, each one becomes a trigger for the other. Hear the song, feel the act. That connection is inseparable. And with Cirque du Soleil, that inseparability is anything but accidental.
This isn’t by chance. Every single touchpoint has been curated.
Which makes sense, really, when you understand what they are. They’re not just a circus. They never have been.
Cirque du Soleil was founded in 1984 by a group of street performers from Baie-Saint-Paul, Québec – stilt-walkers, fire-breathers, jugglers – led by a young Guy Laliberté, who had a vision for something that had never existed before. No animal acts. No star performers. No spoken dialogue. Instead, a fusion of acrobatics, theatre, dance, and original music that told a story entirely through movement and feeling. What started as 73 people performing for 800 seats in a big top tent has since been seen by more than 90 million people across more than 130 cities worldwide. Not bad for a group of buskers with a dream.
That global success didn’t happen because the acrobatics are extraordinary, though they really are. It happened because of the total intentionality of the experience. Every detail considered. Every sense accounted for.
It starts before you even arrive. In the lead-up to the show, you receive an email introducing you to the characters you’ll meet on the day – a little about each of them, their story, their world. They begin telling the story before you’ve walked through the door. So by the time you take your seat, you’re already invested. Already piecing it together. Already emotionally present in a way you’re not when you arrive somewhere cold.
On the day, it’s by no means a string of back-to-back tricks. It’s a visual production that tells a complete story without a single word being spoken. It takes you on a full emotional journey – awe, wonder, shock, fear, joy, surprise – and the music holds a lot of that together.
The Kooza soundtrack was composed specifically for the show by Jean-François Côté, drawing on an unlikely mix of 1970s funk, orchestral film scores from the 1940s and 50s, traditional Indian classical music, and contemporary pop. The result is a score that sounds like nothing else – because it was built to sound like Kooza, and only Kooza. And I loved to learn that it’s actually performed live at every show by real musicians who respond in real time to what’s happening on stage. The music breathes with the performance.
When your nervous system is already heightened watching something terrifying – hi, Wheel of Death – and the music is live and moving with that moment, you don’t separate the two. They become one experience. And that’s how they encode together in your memory, inseparable from each other.
The Spotify playlist isn’t an afterthought. It’s a deliberate extension of the brand experience into daily life. Every time you hear a distinctive beat and feels that same flash of awe from the tent – the brand is present. That is sonic branding working at its most sophisticated.
The power of sound. And the sense most brands don’t think about at all.
Sound barely gets a mention in most brand conversations – which is worth pausing on, really, when you consider that it’s the one sense that seems to completely bypass rational thought and go straight to how we feel. We spend suych an enormous amount of time perfecting how our brands look – the logo, the colour palette, the typography, every detail of the photography. All of it essential. But sound? Usually an afterthought, if it’s considered at all.
The research on this is genuinely surprising. Sonic logos trigger emotional responses 86% faster than visual ones. Audio cues are recalled 65% more effectively than visual cues after just one week. And 77% of people remember a brand more easily when it has a distinct sound. Crazy, right!? For something that works this fast and sticks this long, that feels like a pretty significant thing to be leaving on the table.
Think about how quickly you recognise the Netflix ta-dum. That familiar McDonald’s jingle “da da da da daa”. These aren’t accidents – they’re the result of deliberate sonic strategy. Sounds designed to trigger an immediate emotional and brand association, often before a single visual has registered.
Cirque du Soleil understand this at a level most brands never reach. The music wasn’t composed to fill silence. It was composed to become the emotional backbone of the entire experience – specific enough that each act has its own sonic identity, powerful enough that even a child can use it as a memory key weeks later, from a single viewing.
Sound is the most underused sense in branding. It bypasses rational thought, encodes emotional memory faster and more durably than visuals alone, and keeps working for your brand long after the original experience is over.
So when people come to me and say ‘I just want a logo’…
My heart sinks a little. What they’re really asking for is something much bigger – a brand that’s recognisable, trusted, consistent, and that creates a lasting impression. And a logo, however beautifully crafted, cannot do all of that on its own.
The visual identity is the foundation. But the full brand experience is built from every sense. What does your brand feel like? What does it sound like? What does it make people feel when they encounter it somewhere unexpected? These aren’t extras. They’re the details that accumulate into something that either feels considered and intentional – or doesn’t. Not just a logo – a brand being. An ethos.
Something that lives in all the senses, not just the ones you can see.
Which got me thinking about how First Sense sounds.
Over the years I've been building a playlist myself — songs that moved me for reasons I couldn't always explain. And then at some point I noticed something. A consistent mood running through all of them. A feeling that connects every track, regardless of genre or tempo. Something unmistakably… well, First Sense.
I didn't curate it that way intentionally. It revealed itself. Which, when you think about it, is exactly how the best brand identities work. They're not manufactured. They're discovered.
That playlist has now been made public - I'd love for you to take a listen and tell me what you think. Whether you're deep in creative work or just getting the house back in order - pop it on and see where it takes you. If First Sense were a person, what words would you use to describe them?
I suspect it will tell you more than any 'about' page ever could.
Listen to the First Sense playlist on Spotify here.
Image by Matt Beard Photography.
