I've been thinking about what separates the things I love from the things I merely like. Not quality - there are plenty of high-quality things I feel nothing about. Not innovation - some of my favourite things are doing nothing new at all. The word I keep coming back to is coherence. The quality where everything fits. Where the name, the design, the tone, the experience, the packaging, the way it makes you feel - all of it's saying the same thing. Nothing jars. Nothing contradicts. Nothing pulls you out of the world the thing has created. Everything is one.
Coherence is the hardest thing to achieve in anything you build. It's easy to have a good name. It's easy to have good design. It's easy to have a good product. It's extraordinarily difficult to have all three pulling in exactly the same direction, reinforcing each other, creating a single unified impression that doesn't fracture the moment you look at it from a different angle. Most products are a collection of good decisions that don't cohere. Individually excellent. Collectively dissonant.
I notice this immediately. It's the first thing I notice, actually, before features, before functionality, before anything else. Does this thing feel like one thing? Or does it feel like several things awkwardly sharing a logo? That test - the coherence test - is the single most reliable predictor I've found for whether something is going to be great or just good.
What coherence looks like
Let me give you an example. There's a brand called Flowers for Society - founded by Till Jagla, who spent years at Adidas. It's a small brand making sneakers, clothing, lifestyle products. What makes it remarkable isn't any individual product. It is the coherence. The name says something - it positions the brand as something with a point of view, something that gives back, something that cares about more than commerce. The design reinforces that - considered, restrained, never shouting. The photography, the packaging, the website, the way they talk about what they do - it all says the same thing. You could look at any single element in isolation and know what the other elements would feel like. That is coherence.
Contrast this with - well, most things. Most products have a name that was chosen by marketing, a design that was chosen by the design team, copy that was written by the content team, and a product that was built by engineering. Each department did good work. But nobody sat in the middle and asked: does this all feel like one thing? Does the name match the design? Does the copy match the experience? Does the packaging match the product? The answer, almost always, is no. Not because the individual pieces are bad. Because nobody owned the coherence.
The Wieden+Kennedy Nike campaigns from the 2000s - the ones I grew up watching, the ones that made me want to work in advertising - had this quality. "Just Do It" wasn't just a slogan. It was a design principle, a tone of voice, a casting direction, an editing style, a music choice. Everything in those campaigns was saying the same thing. The athlete, the edit, the typography, the sound - all of it was aligned. You could watch a Nike ad with the logo removed and know it was Nike. That's what coherence does. It makes the brand bigger than any individual execution.
Why most things fail
Coherence fails for the same reason most things fail in organisations: too many people, too many decisions, too little shared understanding of what the thing is supposed to feel like. The name gets decided in one meeting. The design gets decided in another. The product roadmap gets decided in a third. And nobody in any of those meetings has a shared, visceral, felt understanding of what unites all the decisions. They have a strategy document, maybe. A brand guidelines PDF. But documents don't create coherence. Taste creates coherence. And taste is a quality of individual humans, not of committees.
This is why the best brands - the ones with real coherence - almost always have a single person at the centre whose taste is the organising principle. Virgil Abloh at Off-White. Jony Ive at Apple. Emily Weiss at Glossier in its early years. These weren't people who made every decision. They were people who set the taste - the frequency, the feeling, the filter - that every decision had to pass through. When that person leaves, the coherence often leaves with them. Because coherence isn't a system. It is a sensibility.
I think about this with my own projects. Modern Retro has coherence. The name - Modern Retro - tells you exactly what it's: modern brands through a retro lens. The visual style - 70s retail stores, warm tones, analogue textures - reinforces the name. The brand selection, the scoring system, the way I talk about it - all one thing. You land on the site and you know immediately what world you're in. Nothing jars. Nothing pulls you in a different direction. It feels, if I can say this without sounding ridiculous, like one idea expressed through many decisions.
The coherence audit
I've started running what I call a coherence audit on everything I build. It isn't formal - it's more like a gut check. I look at the project and ask a series of questions. Does the name match the experience? If I showed someone just the name, would they guess what the design looks like? Does the design match the tone? If I showed someone just the visuals, would they guess how the copy reads? Does the copy match the product? If I read someone the about page, would they guess what the thing actually does?
If the answer to all of these is yes - if every element predicts every other element - the project has coherence. If any answer is no - if the name feels like one thing and the design feels like another - there is a problem. Not a feature problem or a design problem or a naming problem. A coherence problem. And coherence problems are the hardest to fix because they require changing multiple things simultaneously to bring them into alignment.
Of the fourteen projects I have built, I think two fully pass the coherence test. Modern Retro and Taste OS. Modern Retro because it's so conceptually tight that incoherence has nowhere to hide. Taste OS because the framework - scoring brands on taste dimensions - gives everything a structural backbone that holds the whole thing together. The others have coherence in parts. Good name but the design drifts. Strong design but the name doesn't quite match. Solid product but the way I talk about it feels disconnected from what it actually does.
That isn't failure. That's the reality of building fast, which I believe in. You ship, you learn, you tighten. Coherence isn't something you achieve in version one. It's something you approach over time, with each iteration bringing the pieces a little closer together. But you have to know it is the goal. You have to be looking for it. Because if you aren't actively pursuing coherence, entropy will pull every element in its own direction and you'll end up with a product that works but doesn't feel like anything.
Coherence as philosophy
I think coherence is more than a product quality. It's a life philosophy, or at least it's becoming one for me. The projects I build, the things I care about, the way I want to spend my time - I want all of that to cohere. I want the blog to feel like the products. I want the products to feel like the person. I want someone who reads my writing to predict what my projects look like, and someone who uses my projects to predict how I write. All one thing. One sensibility expressed across multiple formats.
That's what building as a non-coder, as a strategy person who taught himself to make things, has given me. Before I could build, my taste existed in one format - presentations, strategies, recommendations. Now it exists in websites, products, writing, design. And the more formats it exists in, the more coherent my identity becomes. Not because I'm performing consistency. Because the taste underneath is the same, and when the same taste runs through enough different expressions, a pattern emerges that's bigger than any individual thing.
When I think about what I want next - the dream role, the dream project, the dream version of my career - coherence is at the centre. Head of Culture at a brand with physical products. That role, if it exists, is essentially a coherence job. Make sure the brand's relationship to culture is coherent across every touchpoint. Make sure the products, the communications, the partnerships, the tone, the design, the retail experience, the digital experience - make sure all of it's saying the same thing. Make sure nothing jars. That's the job I was born to do. I just didn't know the word for it until now.
Coherence. The quality that separates good from great. The thing you feel before you can name. The difference between a product and a world. The thing I'm chasing, project by project, iteration by iteration, until everything I touch feels like one thing. Because one coherent thing, no matter how small, is worth more than a hundred excellent things that don't fit together. The parts have to cohere. Otherwise you just have parts.
