In February 2007, Howard Schultz wrote a memo to Jim Donald about what had happened to Starbucks stores. "Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale," he wrote. The result, he said, was that "some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter." He called them "stores that no longer have the soul of the past." The memo became public within two weeks, and a Starbucks spokeswoman confirmed to Reuters that it was real.

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Now look at Aesop, because Aesop is the other answer to the same problem.

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Dennis Paphitis, who started the company in Melbourne in 1987, told Dezeen that he never wanted "a standard Aesop shade of orange or green." Any brand can say what it won't do, but saying and doing are often two very different things.

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The NoMad store in New York City was designed by Cyril Marsollier and Wallo Villacorta, who met while working in-house for Aesop in 2016 and started their own practice in 2020. They uncovered century-old iron columns in the space. They answered the neighborhood's awnings with steel frames and canvas panels. They made the sinks from wire shelving of the kind once found in the wholesale shops nearby. Their description of the method in Wallpaper: "First, we try to learn from the buildings and spaces to find a respectful and considered response."

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In Rome, the Swiss architect Jakob Sprenger told the same magazine, "The briefs I receive are usually loose, with a few functional requirements." In Copenhagen, Aesop's design team built a store whose floor plan mirrors the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and Marianne Lardilleux, Aesop's director of global retail design, told Dezeen in 2024, "We are not interested in rolling out identical interiors."

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If that were the whole story, it would be a story about freedom, but that isn't the whole story. According to the same Wallpaper piece, Aesop carefully records its standards at its headquarters in London and offices around the world, down to the choice of chair. The article says these standards took decades to get right. Lardilleux has a team of 43 overseeing the stores. Before a project starts, collaborators are given three books: Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres, Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. Lardilleux put it this way: "I realised that it is mostly about an attitude; how you welcome people." Wallpaper's Dal Chodha calls the approach "an intellectual balance between the material and the mind."

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So, what Aesop defined is an attitude, and a short list of specific details. Everything else it borrows from the street. The standards are on paper. What surrounds them is up for interpretation.

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By 2023, the company had more than 200 standalone stores and 80 counters, according to Wallpaper, and L'Oréal announced in April of that year that it was buying the business for A$3.7 billion, about US$2.5 billion. I can't tell you how much of that price comes from the store design, but I can tell you the approach was not an early-stage luxury that got dropped once the company grew. Lardilleux was still describing it to Icon in September 2025 as "a pragmatic approach deciding on how the store will speak to its local community."

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Most brands treat consistent and identical as the same word. If the customer should be able to recognize the brand, the thinking goes, then everything should look the same everywhere. Consistency is a promise about what the customer can count on, and the brand gets to choose what goes into that promise. Schultz's memo is what happens when the promise is the look and the look is streamlined for scale.

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Eighteen years after the memo, Starbucks is trying something different. Fortune reported in July 2025 that redesigns under CEO Brian Niccol's "Back to Starbucks" plan are meant to give each location a unique feel through locally inspired art, with a dark green and hardwood store in Bridgehampton and one in East Hampton with artwork that nods to its seafaring history. In April 2026, Starbucks published its own account of a Chicago makeover, in which design director Stephenie Rychlik said the goal was to "help coffeehouses reflect the feel of their unique neighborhoods." Some of the cafés use local artists' work, and some nod to the city's industrial buildings. Fortune also reported that Schultz "did a cartwheel" when he heard about the plan.

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I don’t know whether it will work, and nothing I've read has measured that. What I have read is that Starbucks's version leans on local art and warmer seating. Aesop's starts with what the building and neighborhood already are. Those are different depths. Those columns in New York were there before Aesop arrived; they just embraced them as part of the built environment they wanted to become part of. Both are acceptable answers, but I lean toward Aesop's. It is the richer answer to a common problem, because it trusts the brand to stay itself without being identical.

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That trust has to come from somewhere. A brand that treats its look as the whole brand has no choice but to keep the look identical, because changing it feels like changing the brand. A brand that knows what it fundamentally is can let the look change, because the look was never the entire brand. That is why a core truth matters. Everything else is built on it, and it is what stays recognizable when the stores, the materials and the neighborhoods change. With one, a brand can flex as far as it chooses, and some choose not to at all. Without one, flexing becomes drift, because nothing underneath anchors it.

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Identical only needs a template. Consistent needs a brand that knows exactly what it is.

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Which parts of your brand are you forcing to match when they should be answering to where they live?