You Are Not Your Customer

Almost every brief I receive from founder-operators contains a version of this sentence: “I want it to feel like a place I would want to go.”

It’s an understandable instinct. In the early stages of a brand, it can even be an incredibly valuable one. A founder’s personal taste often provides the specificity and conviction that makes a new concept feel different from everything around it.

The trouble starts when “I like this” because the reason behind the design decision.

Founder “Taste” is Highly Valuable—Until it Isn’t

The strongest brands in retail and QSR are almost always rooted in a founder’s specific aesthetic sensibility—their particular way of seeing, their cultural references, their idiosyncratic preferences about materials, space, and atmosphere. By contrast, a space built primarily from market research and competitive analysis can feel flat, like a copy-paste of everything else around it.

For a first location, founder taste is an incredibly useful resource. You’re creating something without much evidence yet. There are no existing stores to study and no years of customer behavior to analyze. At some point, someone has to decide what this brand feels like, and a founder with a strong point of view is often the best person to begin answering that question.

The challenge is understanding why you like what you like.

Imagine a founder who loves mid-century Danish furniture and wants it throughout her restaurant. “I love this” is a perfectly reasonable starting point, but it doesn’t tell us much about the brand.

Maybe what the founder actually responds to is the warmth of the wood, the visible craftsmanship, the simplicity of the forms, or the sense that these objects were made to last. Now we have something useful.

Warmth, craftsmanship, simplicity, and permanence can inform an entire environment. Danish furniture is one expression of those qualities, but it doesn’t have to become a requirement for every future location.

This distinction becomes especially important as a brand grows. If you understand only the original design solution, you repeat it. If you understand the thinking behind it, you can adapt it.

Your Actual Customer May Surprise You

Most founders have a customer in mind when they develop a concept—an idealized guest who represents the target audience. That guest is usually remarkably similar to the founder: similar demographic, similar aesthetic sensibility, similar relationship to the product. Operators tend to build from what they know.

For a first store, that’s usually where you have to start. You don’t know exactly who will show up, how they’ll use the space, or which parts of the experience will matter most to them.

Once the doors open, you begin getting information you couldn’t have had before.

Maybe customers stay for 45 minutes when you designed around a 20-minute visit. Maybe your long, central lunchroom-style tables sit empty while everyone competes for smaller booths along the perimeter. Families become a significant part of the dinner crowd when you expected mostly young professionals. The production process you put on display turns out to fascinate customers while an expensive design feature you considered central to the concept barely registers.

Those observations should influence the next location. People are very good at showing you how they use a space, even if they can’t necessarily tell you how to design it.

Your point of view still provides direction. Now it has evidence to work with.

Principles Scale Better Than Preferences

As a concept grows, one of the most useful exercises is separating brand constants from design expressions.

Brand constants are the qualities the physical experience should consistently communicate: perhaps warmth, irreverence, craft, abundance, precision, or sociability.

Design expressions are the specific choices used to communicate them: walnut paneling, handwritten menu boards, vintage chairs, an open kitchen.

The constants should change slowly and deliberately. The expressions can evolve.

Consider a communal table that becomes a dining feature of the first location. Maybe the founder loves it because it expresses generosity, sociability, and the possibility of spontaneous interaction between guests. Those qualities may be essential to the brand. The twelve-foot table isn’t necessarily essential at all.

When a great second location comes along with a smaller footprint, the brand doesn’t have to choose between abandoning its identity and forcing a table into a room that can’t comfortably hold it. If the team understands what the table was meant to accomplish, they can look for another way to create the same experience—perhaps through closely spaced two-tops that can be pushed together, a shared counter along an open kitchen, or a seating layout that encourages groups to overlap rather than retreat into separate corners.

The design changes. The idea survives.

This gives a growing brand considerably more freedom. A historic storefront, suburban shopping center, and airport location don’t need to look identical to feel unmistakably related. Each can respond to its architecture, customer patterns, and operational constraints while expressing the same underlying principles.

It also prevents the first store from accidentally becoming sacred. Some elements may become iconic and deserve to follow the brand for decades. Others may simply reflect the available space, the original budget, or what the founder happened to love at the time.

Knowing the difference is part of growing up as a brand.

You Still Get a Vote

None of this means handing design decisions over to customer surveys.

The founder’s taste remains an important part of the equation. It provides the specificity that made the concept interesting enough for people to notice in the first place. As the business matures, that instinct simply has more information to contend with.

At the first location, you’re asking: What do we believe this brand should be?

Once it’s operating: How are people actually experiencing it? What did we get right? What did we misunderstand?

And when it’s time to expand: Which parts of this experience are essential, and which were simply one way of expressing them?

“I want it to feel like a place I would want to go” is a pretty good place to start.

Building a brand means knowing why—and eventually understanding when your customer needs something different.

Building your first location—or figuring out what should carry forward to the next one? We can help turn your point of view into a brand that’s built to grow.

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