Strategy
Before the brand, a belief: why a founder’s story can make a company memorable
When a company is too young to have a history, its story is already there, in the people who started it. The work is learning how to tell it.
When a company is too young to have a history, its story is already there, in the people who started it. The work is learning how to tell it.
We are creatures of story. Long before anyone designed a logo, people sat around fires and told each other what had happened, what it meant, and what might come next. We still do. We just do it in meetings, in reviews, in the way we explain to a friend why we keep buying the same coffee.
This is more than a romantic idea. At Stanford, Chip Heath asks his students to give one-minute speeches built on crime statistics. Most speakers use numbers; only one in ten tells a story. Minutes later, when he asks the class what they remember, the result reverses: 63% recall the stories, while only 5% recall a single statistic. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has measured something similar in the body. Character-driven stories raise oxytocin, a chemical linked to empathy, and the more people’s oxytocin rose, the more they donated to a charity tied to what they had just watched.
A story, in other words, is how an interaction becomes a memory. And memory is what every brand is competing for.
What a story does to an object
In 2009, writers Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn ran an experiment called Significant Objects. They bought ordinary things at thrift stores: a mallet, an ashtray, a snow globe, for a total of $128.74. Then they asked writers to invent a short story for each one and listed the objects on eBay with those stories attached. They sold for $3,612.51. A globe paperweight bought for $1.49 sold for $197.50.
Nothing about the objects had changed. Only their meaning had.
Brands work the same way. Two products can share a factory, a price, and a shelf. The one that carries a story people can retell is the one they remember, and often the one they choose.
“We don’t have a story yet”
We hear this often from new companies. They have a product, a business plan, and sometimes a name chosen in a hurry. What they don’t have, they believe, is a history worth telling.
They usually do. It just hasn’t reached the brand yet. It lives with the founders: the belief that made someone leave a stable job, put their savings on the line, or insist on an idea that no one else could see.
Airbnb’s origin is a well-known example. In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t afford their rent in San Francisco, so they put air mattresses on the floor and offered them to visitors in town for a design conference. That small, slightly desperate scene explains the company’s promise of belonging better than any manifesto could. It is specific, it has tension, and it makes the founders’ belief visible.
When a brand is young, the founders’ story is its first and most credible asset. When a brand is older and has lost its way, that same story is often the thread worth pulling to find it again.
A word on a sticky note
Our own name began this way. Years before the agency existed, Aletzeh, one of our founders and a writer at heart, wrote a short story. Its narrator learns a new word and admits:
“I learned a new word, though I still don’t know how to use it.”
The word was incólume. In Spanish, it describes something unharmed, intact, whole. She wrote it down with its definition on a sticky note and kept it on her desk for years, until the word was no longer something she had read but something she meant.
When the agency was born, the word became its name and its standard: processes and results that hold up, work that leaves nothing broken along the way. It also gave us our signature. If something is whole, it is free to pursue what is beautiful, and so we call ourselves Brand Philocalists, from the Greek for those who love beauty.
The founding belief was just as specific. Branding studios were producing logos on a screen, while artists worked far from the corporate world. We wanted to build a bridge between the two. Our early identities carried that belief in their materials: illustrations for a coffee brand.
painted with coffee itself, and stamps cut from flowers for a hat maker, their negative shapes becoming the pattern. Nine years later, art still shapes how we work. We visit exhibitions as a team every year, and we are making room in our studio to show artworks.
None of this needed inventing. It needed to be noticed, and then told on purpose.
From biography to brand narrative
A founder’s story is not a biography. Dates, degrees, and a list of previous jobs rarely move anyone. To turn a founder’s dream into a perspective the whole brand can speak from, we look for five things.
The belief, not the résumé. Ask what the founders wanted to change, not what they did before. A belief can guide a hundred decisions; a timeline guides none.
The tension. Every story needs friction: something missing, something wrong in the category, a moment when the idea almost didn’t happen. Without tension, there is information, but no story.
The audience’s place in it. The founder’s story is the origin, not the whole plot. It earns its place when it explains why the people a brand serves should care. This is where storytelling meets brand positioning: who you are, what sets you apart, and why it matters to someone else.
Proof in the details. A story told only on the About page is a claim. A story carried into a name, a material, a tone of voice or a ritual becomes an experience. Pegachingón, for example, took its name from the language of the people who use the product on the job site.
The truth. Invented origins tend to collapse under the weight of a real conversation. Specificity is what makes a story credible, and only the true version is specific enough.
Why it lasts
People rarely remember a value proposition word for word. They remember the founder who rented out air mattresses, the coffee painted with coffee, the word kept on a sticky note. They remember because a story gives them something to retell, and what people retell becomes what a brand means.
That is why we begin our brand strategy work by listening to the people who started the company, long before anyone opens a sketchbook. Somewhere in their story is the belief the brand will carry.
We learned a new word once. It took us years to learn how to use it.
Sources
Paul J. Zak, “Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling” (2014) · PDF