For more than a century, Louis Sullivan's "form follows function" shaped how we build and design. Function was the frontier then. Today, advanced manufacturing, shared supply chains, and decades of design methodologies have raised the floor so high that looking good and working well are no longer a strategy. They're the most basic expectation.
In a market filled with competent options, customers don't choose a product based on form and function alone. They choose because it has meaning — the accumulated weight of a thousand decisions that tell them whether a company stands for something worth remembering, or not.
Brand defines meaning. Design makes meaning visible. Your products are always communicating on behalf of your brand. What are they saying?
Drawing on decades leading design at YETI, Fortune Brands Water Innovations, M3 Design, and across fifteen other industries, Jayson Simeon makes the case that the relationship between brand and design is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a structural necessity — the only defensible moat left in a market where everything works reasonably well.
The book introduces the frameworks practitioners need to operate from a shared foundation: the Authenticity Gauge, the Brand Expansion Flywheel, and Brand Jenga — the diagnostic and operational tools that turn brand-led design from a slogan into a repeatable practice.
If your brand has ever claimed to be one thing but the products told another story, this book was written for you.
