From the CEO’s desk.

At a noisy party last week, a stranger asked me what I do for a living. I started to say “I run a branding agency” but stopped. After 25 years, that phrase feels too small for the work.

So I tried something else. You know that moment when you walk into a place and within ten seconds you’ve decided whether it’s your kind of thing? That decision wasn’t an accident. Somebody, a team like ours, designed it.

PurpleAsia helps organisations figure out what they should feel like to the people who use them. Sometimes that’s a Philippe Starck residence on the Vietnamese coast. Sometimes it’s a charity raising money for newborns who wouldn’t otherwise survive. Sometimes it’s a pet supplement brand trying to reach owners in regional Australia. Sometimes it’s the launch of a superyacht, or a new restaurant, or a platform for one of the world’s largest hotel groups…

Different sectors, different scales, same underlying questions—what is this thing actually for, and how should it make people feel?

The reason it stays interesting 25 years in is that you cannot fake a feeling. You can copy a logo. You can copy a slogan. You cannot copy the moment a guest decides they trust you, or a donor decides to give, or a customer decides to come back—THAT moment is what we work on.

In the end, the music was too loud and I never finished my answer at the party. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since.