Taste has been on my mind a lot recently. Not as a trend and not as a skill, but as the foundation everything meaningful is built on. I’ve come to believe that if something starts without taste, it will never gain it later. You can decorate it, style it, wrap it in strategy, but it will never carry the flavour it needs. Much like a coffee, if the beans are wrong, the drink is off. It doesn’t matter how much milk you add. The origin decides everything.
In branding and creativity, the origin is your intent. It’s the reason you started and the clarity you had before the world began to influence the work. When the intent is strong, the flavour arrives naturally. Ideas feel textured. Decisions feel confident. The brand has personality woven through its language, visuals and behaviour. You can feel it before you can explain it.
The challenge is what happens after. Flavour begins to fade quietly. A brand grows. More people join the conversation. Opinions dilute conviction. References become recycled. Suddenly the thing that once felt alive now feels familiar. This is usually the moment founders tell me they feel stuck. The taste has flattened and they can feel it even if they cannot articulate why.
The truth is simple. Taste requires upkeep. It needs curiosity. It needs friction. It needs new inputs and a willingness to challenge your own habits. Flavour disappears the moment a brand starts protecting what it has rather than questioning what it could be. You see this in companies that once led culture and now chase it. They forget that taste is not decoration. It’s identity.
I see it often in creative teams too. When work becomes efficient, taste suffers. When you already know what the outcome will look like, the flavour is gone. Creative taste comes from being exposed to new worlds, not from repeating what worked last time. You have to keep refreshing your eye. You have to stay close to culture, not
industry noise.
What people misunderstand is that taste is not about being stylish. It’s about sensitivity. It’s about noticing details, making deliberate choices, and holding standards even when no one is watching. When brands lose their taste, they lose their point of view. They stop surprising themselves, which means they stop surprising their audience.
Everything has flavour until it loses its taste. The brands and creatives who stay relevant are the ones who treat taste as a practice. They revisit their origins often. They refine their palette. They build worlds where the intention is felt, not forced.
If the flavour is fading, the answer is rarely reinvention. It is a return. A return to the beans. A return to the question that started it all. A return to the taste you trusted before the world tried to influence the recipe.
Because in the end, the work only holds flavour if you do.
Shot of the good stuff.
