There is an Aesop store in Marylebone that I walk past more often than I should admit. I rarely go in. I don't need hand soap. But I slow down every time. Not to look at the products, but to look at the space. The dark wood. The brass fixtures. The apothecary bottles lined up with a precision that feels almost medical. It doesn't look like a shop. It looks like somewhere you'd go to have a serious conversation about skincare with someone who has read more books than you.

This is the Aesop effect. And it is, I think, the clearest example of what taste looks like when it reaches its final form.

Selling soap in a gallery

Let's start with the obvious: Aesop sells soap. Hand wash, face cleanser, body lotion. These are commodity products. You can buy soap anywhere. You can buy good soap from plenty of places. The functional difference between a forty-pound bottle of Aesop hand wash and a three-pound bottle from the supermarket is, in terms of getting your hands clean, essentially zero.

So why does Aesop command those prices? Why do people not just pay them but feel good about paying them? Why do people display empty Aesop bottles in their bathrooms as if they were ornaments? The answer is not the soap. The answer is everything around the soap.

Every Aesop store is designed by a different architect. The store in Melbourne looks nothing like the store in Tokyo which looks nothing like the store in London. And yet they are all unmistakably Aesop. This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to achieve. Most brands create consistency through uniformity: the same colours, the same layout, the same experience repeated identically worldwide. Aesop creates consistency through sensibility. The materials change. The layout changes. The lighting changes. But the feeling is always the same. Considered. Calm. Intelligent. Warm without being soft.

Every Aesop store is different. Every Aesop store is unmistakably Aesop. That is the hardest thing in branding: consistency without uniformity. A feeling so embedded in the decisions that it survives any surface change.

This is what separates taste from aesthetics. Aesthetics is a look. Taste is a sensibility. You can copy a look. You cannot copy a sensibility, because a sensibility isn't in any single decision. It is in the accumulated weight of a thousand decisions, each one reinforcing the others, each one so aligned with the whole that no individual choice stands out. That is the Aesop effect: when every detail is so right that no single detail demands attention.

The packaging as marketing

I want to talk about those bottles. The amber glass. The sans-serif type. The clean, pharmaceutical labelling with just enough information and no decoration whatsoever. There is no logo screaming at you. No colour-coded range shouting BUY ME in primary colours. Just a quiet, confident bottle that communicates its values through restraint.

People keep these bottles. They refill them. They display empty ones on bathroom shelves. I have seen Aesop bottles in the background of more Instagram photos than I can count, positioned carefully next to books and candles and other objects that signal a certain kind of life. The bottle has become a prop in the performance of taste. It says something about the person who owns it, and what it says is: I notice things. I care about the details. I chose this.

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The empty bottle test: If people keep your packaging after the product is gone, you have achieved something beyond marketing. You have made an object that people feel says something about them. The packaging has become the product. Very few brands pass this test.

This is marketing without marketing. Aesop does not run television ads. It does not do influencer campaigns. It does not chase trends or do limited-edition collaborations with streetwear brands. Its marketing strategy is, essentially: make everything so considered that people do the marketing for you. When your store is beautiful enough to photograph and your packaging is beautiful enough to display, you have turned your customers into your media channel. And you've done it without asking.

The brands that try too hard

Here is where the Aesop effect becomes useful as a lens for understanding other brands. There is a category of brand that I think of as performatively tasteful. They have invested heavily in design. They have hired the right agencies. Their packaging is beautiful. Their stores are impressive. But something feels off. Something feels like it is trying.

You can feel the brief behind the design. You can sense the strategy deck. There's a self-consciousness to it, a "look how considered we are" energy that undermines the very thing it is trying to achieve. Because taste, real taste, is invisible. The moment you notice someone trying to have taste, the spell breaks. It's like watching someone dance who is thinking about their feet.

Aesop never feels like it is trying. It feels like it simply is. The design choices feel inevitable rather than chosen. The restraint feels natural rather than strategic. There is no wink to the audience, no "we know you know." It is just a soap company that happens to care deeply about how things look, feel, and communicate. And that effortlessness, which is of course the result of enormous effort, is what makes it work.

The moment you notice someone trying to have taste, the spell breaks. Real taste is invisible. It doesn't announce itself. It just feels right, the way a good sentence reads as though it wrote itself.

What Aesop understands about luxury

There is an old definition of luxury that centres on materials and exclusivity. Luxury is rare things, expensive things, things that most people cannot have. Aesop is not luxury by this definition. It is expensive for soap, but it is not exclusive. Anyone can walk in. There are no waiting lists, no membership requirements, no velvet ropes.

But there is a newer definition of luxury that is about care. Luxury is the feeling that someone has thought about every detail on your behalf. That nothing has been overlooked. That every surface you touch, every interaction you have, has been considered. By this definition, Aesop is one of the most luxurious brands in the world. Because the care is total. It extends from the product formulation to the bottle design to the store architecture to the font on the receipt. There is no point at which the care drops off. There is no moment where you think, "ah, they didn't think about this bit."

This is extraordinarily rare. Most brands have gaps. Moments where the experience breaks. The beautiful product arrives in a cheap box. The stunning store has a tacky checkout process. The considered packaging leads to a mediocre product inside. The gap between the best moment and the worst moment is, for most brands, enormous. For Aesop, it barely exists.

Taste so embedded it disappears

I keep coming back to this idea: that the highest expression of taste is when it becomes invisible. When you walk into a space and feel right without knowing why. When you use a product and feel cared for without being able to point to the specific decision that makes you feel that way. When the experience is so coherent that there is nothing to critique because there is nothing that jars.

This is what I aspire to in my own work, building digital products with no coding background and only taste as my guide. I think about Aesop when I'm making decisions about a product's interface. Not because I'm building soap websites, but because the principle transfers: every detail matters, and the goal is for no single detail to dominate. The experience should feel inevitable. It should feel like it couldn't have been any other way.

Most brands think taste is about the big decisions. The logo. The colour palette. The campaign. Aesop understands that taste lives in the small decisions. The weight of the bottle cap. The texture of the paper bag. The way the sales assistant wraps your purchase. The literary quote on the wall of the store. These are the decisions that create the feeling, and the feeling is the brand.

You can spend millions on a rebrand and still feel like you are trying. Or you can care about every small thing, consistently, for decades, until the caring becomes the identity. That is the Aesop effect. It is not a strategy you can implement. It is a conviction you have to hold, across every decision, for longer than most brands have the patience to sustain.

The soap is excellent, by the way. But that was never really the point.