I came to branding from a slightly different direction.
Before I designed identities, I spent around fifteen years in kitchens, across award-winning restaurants and head chef and management roles. I went on to own a restaurant for three years, which earned recognition in the Michelin Guide, and then co-owned another for three years that kept it. Later I opened a Roman-style pizza shop and deli. Different food, different price point, different audience.
None of that is traditional design experience. But it taught me a lot about businesses, customers and the link between what you sell and how people perceive its value. It still shapes how I approach branding today.
The room did as much work as the food
Running a restaurant teaches you quickly that the food is only part of what someone is paying for.
You learn what happens behind the pass when service goes wrong. You learn what it costs, financially and mentally, to hold a standard every night rather than just when someone is watching. And you learn that customers experience the whole business, not only the plate that reaches the table.
The simplest version of the lesson is this: I couldn’t have charged what I did for a meal if the restaurant had looked like a café.
The food wouldn’t have changed. Neither would the ingredients or the work in the kitchen. But the perception of the experience would have been completely different. The room, the tables, the lighting, the service, the menus and all the small details around the food told customers what to expect before they’d taken a bite.
That isn’t decoration. It’s positioning made physical.
Not every brand needs the same room
The pizza shop taught me the same lesson from the other direction.
It wasn’t fine dining. It had a different price point, a different customer and a different atmosphere, and making it look like one of my previous restaurants would have made no sense. But presentation still mattered. A pizza shop doesn’t need white tablecloths to create trust. It needs its own version of the same thing: an identity that feels right for the business, the audience and the experience you’re promising.
Get that relationship wrong in either direction and people notice. Too polished for a casual offer feels disconnected. Too casual for a premium offer undermines what you’re asking people to pay. The design needs to match the promise.
That’s one reason I don’t think good branding can be reduced to making something look attractive. The visual identity has to make sense in the context of the business behind it.
Every business has its own version of the room
I look for this in every project now.
For a restaurant, the room is literal. For another business it might be a website, a shopfront, a sales presentation, a proposal or even the way someone answers the phone. Each of those creates expectations.
When I worked on La Dovecôte, a holiday let and B&B in Sarlat, the identity was built around details that already existed in the property, including the dove house that gives the business its name. The warm, natural direction wasn’t chosen because it looked appropriate for hospitality. It helped communicate the character of the place and what a guest could expect.
Different business, different room, same principle. Understand what the business is promising, then make sure the brand supports it.
Branding changes the context around the product
This is probably the biggest lesson I brought with me from hospitality.
Good branding doesn’t make a product better. It changes the context in which people experience it.
That matters because customers rarely judge anything in isolation. They see the website before they buy, read the menu before they taste the food, receive the proposal before they sign, and see the packaging before they open the product. Every one of those moments shapes their view of the business.
If the product is strong but everything around it feels careless, there’s a disconnect. If the presentation promises a level of quality the business can’t deliver, there’s a different kind of disconnect. The best brands sit between the two. What people see, hear and experience matches what they’re actually going to get.
How I approach brand design now
My background in hospitality doesn’t mean I treat every project like a restaurant. It means I tend to think about the business behind the visuals.
Who is the customer? What are they expecting? What are they being asked to believe? What does the business need to communicate before anyone has spoken to a member of the team?
Those questions are useful whether I’m working with a restaurant, a startup, a professional services firm or an established company that has outgrown its identity. The visual work comes from that understanding.
A logo matters. So do typography and colour. But they’re more useful when they’re solving a problem than when they’re simply making something look better.
Does your brand match the business you’ve built?
If the quality of your business has moved on but the way it presents itself hasn’t, get in touch and we can start a conversation.
