How do you keep your brand fresh not for 10, 20 or even 30 years, but for more than five decades? Inspiration on how to do this came in a talk I attended last week by my design hero, Sir Paul Smith. He is now 80 years old but is still full of energy and ideas. His first shop opened in my home town of Nottingham back in 1970 and more than half a century later, Paul Smith remains a distinctive, relevant global brand. The talk brought to life many of the themes in his new book, THREADS: My Life in Style.
Here are five brand growth lessons I took away.
1. STAY CURIOUS
One of the strongest themes from Paul Smith is the importance of staying curious. He finds inspiration everywhere: art, architecture, travel, music, cycling, everyday objects and, importantly, people. This curiosity has helped keep his creative output fresh for more than 50 years. Sir Paul inspired me to design my own Creative Life course I recently started.
There is a useful lesson here for brand teams. Too much brand development happens within the narrow confines of category reports, competitor reviews and consumer research. These all have a role to play, but if everyone looks in the same places, brands risk ending up with the same ideas. Better to build a broader range of insight fuel by looking at adjacent categories, culture, retail, service experiences and the world outside your immediate competitive set.
Brand growth inspiration: Stay curious and look sideways for insight fuel, not just forwards at your competitors.
2. REVITALISE WHAT MADE YOU FAMOUS
Paul Smith is a great example of what we call fresh consistency: a consistent core brand idea and set of distinctive assets, refreshed through new executions over time. The brand has built strong equities around classic British tailoring with an unexpected twist, humour, colour and, of course, the famous Paul Smith stripe.
Crucially, these assets have not been frozen in time. They have been continually refreshed and reinterpreted across products, stores and communication. The lesson for established brands is to resist throwing everything away when growth slows. Strong brands already have valuable memory structure. The better route is to identify the equities that made you famous and find fresh ways to bring them to life.
Brand growth inspiration: Remember what made you famous, then refresh it for today using fresh consistency.
3. STAND OUT IN THE SEA OF SAMENESS
Another striking part of Paul Smith’s success is his determination to remain distinctive in an increasingly globalised fashion industry. The brand has continued to inject personality, colour and humour into what it does rather than following a more conventional luxury-fashion formula.
Importantly, this distinctiveness is not just an advertising idea. It is baked into the brand through products, stores, design codes and customer experience. The famous bright pink Paul Smith shop in Los Angeles is a good example: a retail location became a distinctive brand asset in its own right (see below). This is especially powerful in categories suffering from a sea of sameness, where everyone uses similar colours, imagery and claims.
Brand growth inspiration: Build distinctiveness into the whole brand mix, not just the advertising, to grow mental availability.
4. STAY CLOSE TO YOUR CUSTOMER
One of my favourite things about Paul Smith is how close he has stayed to customers. Despite running a global brand for decades, he still spends time in stores, talking to people and observing what is happening. We met him in the Burlington Arcade store a couple of years ago, when he took time to sign a lamp Mrs Taylor got for my birthday.
This sounds obvious, but it becomes harder as organisations grow. Senior marketers can become increasingly reliant on dashboards, research reports and PowerPoint decks, rather than spending time with real customers. First-hand contact gives you something different: the details, tensions and surprises that can spark new ideas and reveal opportunities.
Brand growth inspiration: Stay close to the shopfloor. Don’t outsource all your consumer understanding to research and data.
5. STRETH WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SOUL
Paul Smith has grown from a small Nottingham shop into an international brand, but without diluting the personality that made it distinctive in the first place. Expansion into markets such as Japan helped build scale, but the brand remained recognisably Paul Smith.
He has also stretched into different categories, including cars, bicycles, cameras and lamps. The Paul Smith personality and visual assets carry through all of them.
This is fresh consistency in action: one idea, many executions.
Brand growth inspiration: when working on brand stretch, be crystal clear on your strongest equities to build off. 
In conclusion, Sir Paul Smith shows how to revitalise a brand over not just 10, 20 or 30 years, but more than half a century: stay curious, revitalise what made you famous, fight the sea of sameness, stay close to customers and grow without losing what makes you distinctive. It is a great example of fresh consistency in action: constantly moving forward whilst remaining unmistakably you.
