Walk into an Aesop store. The brown bottles, the concrete sinks, the serif typography, the staff who talk to you like they have all the time in the world. It's beautiful. It's also, quite deliberately, not for everyone. The prices exclude. The aesthetic excludes. The fact that there's no music playing excludes the people who need background noise to feel comfortable. The whole thing is a series of choices that narrow the audience, and that narrowing is precisely what makes it work.
Now walk into a pharmacy chain. The fluorescent lighting. The promotional signage screaming three-for-two. The shampoo next to the painkillers next to the greeting cards. It's designed for everyone. Which means it's designed for no one. It has no point of view. No personality. No reason for anyone to feel anything about it at all. You go there because it's convenient, not because it means something.
This is the fundamental tension at the heart of design with taste: the products and brands that create the strongest emotional response are always the ones that have made the bravest exclusions.
The courage to alienate
I spent fifteen years in advertising watching this principle get murdered in boardrooms. A creative team would develop something with a genuine point of view - a campaign that spoke to a specific audience in a specific way, that had edges and opinions and personality. Then the feedback rounds would begin.
"Could we make it appeal to a broader audience?" "My mother-in-law wouldn't understand this." "What about the over-55s?" "Can we test it with a wider panel?"
And slowly, edit by edit, the sharp thing would be sanded into something smooth. Something inoffensive. Something that tested well with everyone and excited absolutely no one. I watched it happen dozens of times. The work that survived the process was always, without exception, the work where someone in the room had the courage to say: "This isn't for everyone. And that's fine."
Apple understood this from the beginning. The original Macintosh wasn't trying to be the computer for everyone - that was IBM's territory. It was the computer for creative people, for people who cared about how things looked and felt, for people who wanted a machine with personality. The fact that business types didn't get it was part of the appeal. The exclusion was the brand.
Muji and the art of deliberate absence
Muji is perhaps the purest example of exclusionary design done right. The brand has made a radical decision to have no brand. No logos on the products. No advertising that shouts. No celebrities. No trend-chasing. Just anonymous, well-made, understated things that do their job without drawing attention to themselves.
This is profoundly alienating to a huge portion of the market. People who want status signalling. People who want their products to say something about them. People who equate value with visible branding. Muji has looked at all of those people and said, quietly and politely, "We're not for you."
And the people who are left - the people who value restraint, who find beauty in anonymity, who want their objects to recede rather than perform - those people don't just buy Muji. They evangelise it. They organise their entire homes around it. They feel seen by a brand that, paradoxically, has chosen to be invisible.
That's the reward for exclusion. The narrower your audience, the deeper their attachment.
The strategy of specificity
This isn't just an aesthetic argument. It's a strategic one. In my strategy work, I'd often push clients toward a concept I called "the smallest viable audience" - borrowed from Seth Godin, who articulated it better than I could. The idea is simple: instead of asking "how do we reach the most people?", ask "who specifically is this for, and what do they care about that nobody else does?"
The answers to that question produce better work every time. Because once you know exactly who you are designing for, every decision becomes clearer. The colour palette isn't a committee consensus - it's a reflection of that specific audience's aesthetic values. The tone of voice isn't "professional yet approachable" - it's the way those specific people actually talk. The feature set isn't everything-for-everyone - it's the precise set of things that audience needs, and nothing they don't.
Notion is a tool for people who think in systems. Figma is a tool for people who think in collaboration. Arc was a browser for people who treat their browser as an operating system. None of these tried to be the default for everyone. They became beloved by being perfect for someone.
My own exclusions
When I build my projects, I think about this constantly. Modern Retro is not for people who want clean, modern, contemporary design. The 1970s aesthetic is deliberately retro, deliberately warm, deliberately textured in ways that minimalist sensibilities might find cluttered. That's the point. The people who love it really love it because it's not trying to be everything.
This portfolio, this blog - it's written for a specific person. Someone who cares about taste and culture and the intersection of strategy and creativity. Someone who reads long-form writing and values opinion over objectivity. Someone who'd rather hear what I actually think than a balanced take designed to offend nobody. If that's not you, there are plenty of other blogs. No hard feelings.
The fear, always, is that exclusion means a smaller market. And technically, it does. But a smaller market that loves you will always outperform a larger market that tolerates you. Aesop is worth billions. Muji is a global empire. Apple is the most valuable company on earth. They didn't get there despite their exclusions. They got there because of them.
The permission to not be liked
The hardest part of designing with taste is accepting that taste is, by definition, divisive. The moment you have a genuine aesthetic point of view, you've drawn a line. Some people will be on your side of it. Some won't. And the temptation - especially in a world of metrics and engagement rates and A/B tests - is to keep redrawing the line to include more people.
Don't. Every time you move the line, you dilute the thing that made people care in the first place. Every compromise in the name of broader appeal is a small betrayal of the people who were already there, who chose you because you stood for something specific.
Design for someone. Design for the person who walks into the Aesop store and exhales. The person who opens Muji's website and feels calm. The person who picks up your product and thinks, "Finally. Something that gets it."
Those people exist. There are more of them than you think. And they're waiting for you to have the courage to make something that's not for everyone else.
