Fishwife tinned seafood is wrapped in vibrant, hand-illustrated boxes 

When we stand in a supermarket or scroll through e-commerce, the hand always moves faster than the mind and the best kind of brands understand this. They don’t want you to know, they want you to wonder.

Take, for example, the mobile phone landscape of 2022. Every major tech giant was engaged in a desperate race for technical specs. The air was thick with megapixels, battery capacities and imaging chips. So, what could a new entrant even say at this time to be heard? Carl Pei decided it was “Nothing”. He simply posted a few visual clues on X and let the internet do its thing. The phone debuted at an exhibition in Basel, like some piece of art. And sold over half a million units in the first five months.

This is the deliberate mastery of strategic desire. The most magnetic brands in the world understand that explaining your product is often the fastest way to kill the magic. What you really need to do is create something that hits the lizard brain first, compelling us to lean in and ask: “I like it. What is it?”

Take the retro-futuristic toy-like design of the Swedish tech brand Teenage Engineering, which makes cult-classic audio products, aesthetic synthesisers and dynamic performance sequencers. The shiny chrome-and-orange body, with mysterious dials and no instructions, makes us want to hold it, flip it and rush to show it to our friends. We may not know how to sequence a beat but we sure want to collect them all.

It can also be used to flip the script — building desire for products for which we have developed a blind spot. For generations, canned fish was a pantry staple hidden on the lowest supermarket shelves. Founded and led by a woman, the company Fishwife, which sells ethically sourced tinned seafood, took this dusty category and wrapped it in vibrant, hand-illustrated boxes that look like pop art. Lo and behold! Instagram found a new darling. Fishwife’s colourful boxes now appear on kitchen counters for the love of aesthetic joy. The tinned fish just happens to be inside it. Or how Graza, based in Brooklyn, US, playfully disrupted the olive oil category with a vibrant, squeezy green bottle, leading to a whole host of me-toos.

And sometimes desire comes from stubborn opacity. Luxury cosmetics brand Aesop’s stores carry a refusal to explain. Customers are made to feel like they are being invited into someone’s home and, before you know it, you are washing your hands at their central stone basin and rearranging your whole home to match the two bottles on your bathroom shelf.

Closer home, take Total Environment. For decades, Indian real estate sold through brute-force aspiration, focusing on marble lobbies, infinity pools and names like ‘Grandeur’ or ‘Elysium’. Total Environment bypassed the megaphone, not bothering with introductions. It built homes where banyan trees burst through living rooms and rainwater cascaded down interior walls. But the real mastery of desire was in the naming. Instead of selling status, they catered to taste. The building names were centred around music and other aesthetics — ‘In That Quiet Earth’, ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ and ‘Down by the Water’. It created an instant insider view. If you got the reference, you were one of them. It shifted the needle from ‘showing’ to ‘knowing’.

Awareness is what you rent. Desire is what you own. Most brands are paying extraordinary rates for rented attention, but true innovators prefer to make you sleuth. By stepping back and leaving room for curiosity, they transform their product from an item to be sold to a treasure to be discovered. Because, ultimately, the most powerful question a brand can generate should not be “What do you do?”, but the far more compelling “Where did you get that?”

(Vatsala Bisen is Executive Creative Director, OPEN Strategy & Design)

Published on July 27, 2026