Craft Is the Brand Now, Not the Logo
From Laila Gohar's edible sculptures to taarini anand's menswear rooted in Indian art, the most compelling brand identities right now are built from a making practice — not a visual system.
The brief used to be: build a recognizable mark, apply it consistently, done. What's shifting is where brand equity actually lives. It's moving from the asset library into the making process itself.
Laila Gohar doesn't sell a logo — she sells a worldview expressed through food as sculpture. Taarini Anand isn't marketing heritage; she's using Indian art as a literal design methodology for menswear. In both cases, the *how* of making is the brand. The visual identity is secondary, almost incidental.
This matters for founders building brands right now. A visual system can be copied in a Figma file inside an afternoon. A genuine making practice — a point of view about materials, process, cultural reference — is much harder to replicate. It has texture. It has history.
The implication for branding work is concrete: before you brief a designer on a logo, brief yourself on your method. What do you actually do that nobody else does, and can you make that visible? Gohar makes it visible through objects that dissolve at dinner tables. Anand makes it visible through silhouettes you can trace to a specific period of Indian visual culture.
Brands that can answer that question — not in a mission statement but in *the work itself* — are the ones that will be harder to commoditize when the market gets tighter.