Brands can, and are, finding themselves stuck in a “reference loop” of category-conforming design choices, according to Jolene Delisle, founder and creative director of US-based branding and creative agency The Working Assembly.
Algorithmically driven digital media and increasingly AI are to blame for this design myopia, said Delisle, but so is the industry’s penchant for “something buzzy” and not tackling the “unsexy” side of creative work.
“The baseline for good design overall is much better [today],” the 2026 Ad Age Leading Women inductee told B&T at the Adobe Max conference in Miami.
“Ten years ago, people would still have questions around design, packaging or just understanding graphic design. But people understand design so much more than they ever have before.
“We’re living in a state where everything is more curated. We have so many more references. We have Instagram and social media where we are all able to judge each other and be purveyors of taste and culture. That has shifted the starting point of where brands can be.”
The Working Assembly’s clients include Amazon, Walmart, Bugaboo and more. It recently released some smart-looking AI-created but illustration-based branding work for voice journaling app Untold.
This rising tide of design has coincided, Delisle said, with an increase in the number of designers and its democratisation through technology. However, she said there is a tendency for these newer entrants to think within category norms.
“We have so many people entering the field and oftentimes the first thing they do is look at references. They look at what other people are doing. They look at what’s working well, what’s in the competitive set and want to make things that feel like they’re going to fit within the category,” Delisle, who founded The Working Assembly in 2017, said.
“We’re seeing a lot of homogeneity.”
There are exceptions that prove the rule. Sunscreen brand Vacation, of which Delisle is a fan, has defied category norms with an expansive piece of brand world building. Its nostalgic, paste-tinged homage to 1980s Miami — very apt for the location of our chat — makes it stand out on the shelves and in social media feeds.
Closer to home, creative agency Pembleton’s Evil Ray sunscreen, with packaging designed by New Zealand’s Seachange has similarly defied category expectations through its positioning as humanity’s defender against a malevolent, skin cancer-causing sun. It took home ANZ’s only Yellow Pencil at the D&AD Awards in the New Brand Identity category. It also won a Graphite for Packaging Design.
There are also challenger brands whose style and approach quickly become de rigueur. Olive oil brand Graza arrived on shelves in January 2022, it stood out from the other glass olive oil bottles with its minimalist packaging design and its plastic squeezy bottle. By the end of 2023, it was making US$19 million a year in sales. These days, it’s the fifth-largest olive oil brand in the US and launched a mayonnaise with a funny ad campaign by US indie creative agency Nice&frank.
“When it first came out, it was such disruptive packaging. They call it chaos packaging. It’s something that you wouldn’t expect to be on the shelf because it doesn’t look like the other products in that category,” Delisle said.
“Within six months, all their competitors had squeezy bottles. That’s when disruption becomes the pattern.”
Graza’s new mayonnaise, sadly, is set to hit the shelves in a very normal jar.
Delisle practices what she preaches, too, as the founder of Cherries, a roadside diner in the small town of Stone Ridge in upstate New York. As the crow flies, it’s about 120km north of Manhattan. It does ice cream, food, catering and merch.
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“It’s going really well,” Delisle said.
“Dua Lipa was there two weeks ago… We’ve had a lot of internet fandom and people come because of the brand we’ve created. It’s a testament to brand…. Sabrina Carpenter is coming and buying merch from us.”
But Cherries also has benefits for The Working Assembly.
“I can say to clients, ‘I can create you a brand. I can get you half a million followers across social media in a year. I’ll show you how to do it myself because I did it. I’ll show you how to create natural organic buzz,’” she said.
“There’s a different conversation that happens when you talk founder to founder to founder, right? I founded an agency and you founded a company, there’s relatability there. [But] there’s an added layer [with Cherries]. You say ‘I started a brand and an idea, I invested capital, I’ve seen it grow and have seen the challenges of a P&L, hard costs, people and those things. It creates a different conversation.
“I wanted to create that conversation for my team because, oftentimes, as designers and creatives we are insular in this agency service world and we get away from the point which is ultimately customers, people and buyers,” Delisle said.
This “insular” approach, Delisle said, comes from designers having to choose between two lanes: advertising or branding.
“You go into advertising and you want to help sell things. You go into branding and you want to help build things. There’s never really been a pathway between the two where you can build and sell. And it’s OK, it’s not a dirty word. There’s an idea that you want to either be an artist or a salesman. I’ve always thought those two things can coexist.”
As such, The Working Assembly takes on projects that Delisle admitted “are not sexiest” but represent “interesting business challenges”.
This approach, she said, leads to the agency building longer term relationships with clients that go beyond branding or creative execution.
“There’s a lot of interest in this industry where people want to create something really buzzy and then move on to the next thing,” Delisle said.
“It’s really unsexy and not a great story when you’ve been working on a brand for five years, you’ve had to refresh it two times, have had to really work hard and our client has changed three times. But it’s a testament to building a business.”
That thirst for the unsexy affects how The Working Assembly hires.
“I don’t think our culture is for everyone. I don’t say that in a way that our culture is a grind… But you’re going to be working on things that are sometimes outside of what you care about doing,” Delisle said.
“But you have to find a way to care and you have to find a way to find that work interesting… We’re not here to make ourselves famous, we’re here to make our clients famous.”
And perhaps there’s no better way to make a brand famous than by standing out from the crowd.
