I own two green suits. They're identical.
I'm not a man with a large wardrobe. My wife stands in front of hers in the morning and generally doesn't know what she wants. Too much choice. I have two or three things I like. They work. I put them on. Someone says, "nice suit," and I say thank you, because here's the quiet trick: almost nobody wears a suit anymore. The moment you do, you've already stood out, and you did it by deciding less, not more.
It sounds like a story about clothes. It isn't. It's the whole of how we've tried to build a design studio.
The easiest way to be different, we found, is not to invent something clever, but to choose something and then refuse to keep changing it: the style of an artist you keep coming back to, a country whose architecture you find genuinely interesting. You pick one, you commit to it publicly, you stick with it long past the point where it stops feeling novel, and you've built a differentiator almost by accident. It's not that the thing itself is rare. It's that consistency is rare, and most people can't sit still long enough to become known for anything.
The smallest version of this, for us, lives in a notebook and a pencil. We take notes in a Moleskine, the dotted one, never the lined one. We write with the Blackwing 602 pencil. If you don't know it, "half the pressure, twice the speed" is the slogan printed on the side, and it has a flat, replaceable eraser instead of the usual round nub. It has a genuinely strange history, too. The pencil went out of production a few years ago, and for a while the old stock was being dug out of the back rooms of libraries and changing hands for fifty dollars a pencil. It doesn't cost that much now, but it carries its story.
And there's the point. You pull the pencil out in a meeting, and without fail someone asks, "what kind of pencil is that?" Now we're talking. Not about the tender, not about the timeline, but about a small, deliberate object that says something about how we work before I've said a word. That little exchange builds more rapport than any capabilities deck ever has.
None of this is about the suit, or the notebook, or the pencil. Those are just objects. The thing underneath is a decision. Work out what you like, choose it on purpose, then hold the line while everyone around you chases the next thing.
We live in an industry, and increasingly a world, of tools that rewards the newest option, the latest workflow, the freshest coat of paint. Differentiation gets sold to us as a reinvention. Rebrand. Pivot. New logo, new palette, new everything.
I simply don't buy it. Differentiation isn't a louder logo. It's a hundred small choices you're disciplined enough to stop changing. Two suits, the same suit. One pencil, same as last year. That's the point.
#DesignStudio #Branding #CreativePractice #Differentiation #StudioLife
