Brand Trip 2025

I’m often asked where Love&Fear is based, and the truth is it’s a question I find difficult to answer. The studio’s central idea was born while I was taking the design leadership program at Future London Academy in London, with classmates from all continents. Somehow this influenced me to think of a studio that could adapt to all geographies and cultures when approaching a brand project.

Legally we are a Chilean studio, however our mindset crosses borders, and once a year as founder I physically travel somewhere in the world to learn firsthand about brands, cities and human behavior in general. This 2025 the base location was Barcelona, a city I’ve been visiting extensively since 2007, definitely a case study city on how design has been one of the pillars of its global positioning, after tourism of course.

For almost ninety days I was exploring the ecosystem of brands and ventures in the Catalan city and participated in three major design events: Milan Design Week, Future Days (in Portugal) and Blanc Mad Festival (in Madrid). With an itinerary open to surprises and the act of discovering, here I share some of my reflections, learnings and insights.

Brand building is for everyone:
No matter the size or industry of your business, creating an identity that connects with a specific audience is something that entrepreneurs and brands in Barcelona understand very clearly. Bakeries, cafés, bookstores, ceramic workshops, nail salons, natural wines are just some examples of how new, small or neighborhood brands can position themselves competitively through their brand identities. No business is too small to leave brand work aside.

Pan Origo:
How does a store with six square meters of space manage to have a line of customers on the street every morning? A belief, a great product, a vision, strategy and brand work make word-of-mouth this bakery’s best growth agent. A few weeks ago they launched a brand upgrade created by the one and only Hey Studio (BCN). Here are their website and Instagram so you can get to know them better. https://www.origobakery.com/pages/nosotroshttps://www.instagram.com/origobakery/

Arpías:
From painting nails to an experience for women who dare. Walking down the street and seeing an electric blue sign that asks you “Are You a Harpy?” makes you wonder what’s in that place and generates immediate curiosity. Appealing and directly challenging what’s most important to every business—their customers—this nail salon doesn’t go unnoticed. What’s more, it’s not just a salon, it’s a complete experience with such a powerful narrative that it calls you to belong to a community of powerful, irreverent women with a voice who gather in a place that understands them. https://www.somosarpias.com/

Casa Taos, Bricks, Nomade, Botanic, Bar La Camila:
Specialty coffee needs a special brand experience. How many specialty coffee shops can exist? This might be many people’s question, however they do their brand work so well that despite being hundreds, each one has its own identity and its community of customers and neighborhood friends. Specialty coffee shops aren’t successful just because they have a good product, but because they dedicate themselves to creating an experience of spaces and flavors that represent the motivations, values, interests and personalities of the audience they seek to attract. They’re successful because they don’t chase, but rather through each of their brand decisions they let their audience know they’re here waiting for them: they attract.

https://www.casa-taos.com/
https://www.instagram.com/bricks.bcn/?hl=eshttps://nomadcoffee.es/https://www.instagram.com/botanic_barcelona/?hl=eshttps://www.instagram.com/barlacamila?utm_medium=copy_link

What do you learn by traveling?
Living the experiences designed by different brands in person is one of the best forms of learning I’ve discovered throughout my career. Experiencing firsthand the results behind the long-term strategies of brands like Ganni, Marimekko, COS and so many others, allows me not only to update myself on best practices in branding or marketing, but also to see in the field how people interact in each brand’s physical spaces and how they behave in the face of various phygital innovations (the intersection between physical and digital). Every experience we design always inhabits a context, which is why it’s vital to explore in real life what’s happening in that context. Getting off the screen today is as important as the financial projection of each business. In times when the speed of change is faster than how long it takes us to realize something changed, being connected to the cultural and social pulse of where our brands will live is imperative.

I travel because taking myself to new locations from time to time allows me to train my power of observation. Being constantly exposed to the same stimuli weakens the ability to see the subtleties of everyday life, autopilot mode is activated more often than I’d like, and we fall into taking for granted many things that could be what makes the difference. However, every time I arrive at a new place my brain and eyes activate to their full potential, because to navigate in a place you don’t know, the first thing you need is to learn to see and distinguish the signals of what’s local, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s accepted and what’s forbidden. Traveling allows me to train my capacity for awareness of what surrounds us, where behaviors, changes, insights and ideas live.

Collaboration begins in person
Collaborating is at the deepest core of Love&Fear’s DNA. I’ve always thought that creativity that impacts is the one born from the intersection of different perspectives. However, in recent years, collaborating has often been confused with the idea of being connected online, sending a couple of emails or uploading endless files to a place in the cloud. But you can’t truly collaborate without the most essential thing: people. Traveling allows me to reconnect with studio collaborators who live in different countries, see each other in person, talk about life, about the projects that move us and about the concerns that surround our act of creating. At the same time, living in other cities for longer than the average tourist time gives me the opportunity to meet new people, new talents and new connections with whom after a first meeting and seeing if our visions are aligned, we open the conversation to the possibility of working together for something of our own or for a client that matches our creative values. I believe true collaboration begins with human connection, and there’s no better way to connect than sharing a good coffee and looking into each other’s eyes.

Design as a business driver
Third, one of the main reasons I travel is to learn from real-life references who use design as one of their business foundations. Design is a discipline whose mission is to create value, identify opportunities that others don’t see and open paths. This is why the role of design is so important in today’s businesses and ventures.

Learning from strategies and visions of those who create brands beyond trends helps me evaluate and improve the way we create for our clients at Love&Fear. Each trip helps me expand the vision of the context where brands move today. Each country and city is a source of inspiration for creating brands that understand human connection.

10 branding and marketing lessons this trip has left me:

1. Creating a brand is creating connection
2. Visuals without real content don’t connect
3. Brand creation is for all businesses (small, medium and large)
4. Strategies and identities designed from emotion and human understanding have greater impact on business positioning and growth
5. In times of ultra-accelerated change, designing and planning long-term is a must, it’s the only way to create experiences and businesses that go hand in hand with the cultural changes that all people will go through
6. In the midst of technological transformation, the human will be a compass that shows us north in how we relate between brands and people
7. Collaboration is a human experience. Meeting and getting to know each other in real life allows us to put the best of our talents and capabilities at the service of high-impact ideas. Today’s brands need a diversity of perspectives, branding and marketing teams must open their doors and ears to people from other disciplines
8. Designing from strategy and emotions is the only way to build consistent, valuable, flexible and dynamic brands for the current and future scenario
9. Return to process. Constant immediacy doesn’t allow us to create the value that people seek and need today. Challenging the status quo of speed will only be for brave brands that understand the reward is in their audiences’ loyalty, in creating communities united by real common values. Process allows us to capitalize on the impact (big or small) of each of our actions
10. The future lies in imagining the-not-yet and imagination is perhaps the main asset we have as humanity, let’s take advantage of it

Each trip reminds me of the importance of connecting with real life. People beyond screens and technological advances, we were, are and will be gregarious beings, who exist from encounter: In Real Life (IRL). This is why at Love&Fear we create human brands and for the human experience.