And so, a good starting point for any brand to think like a curator is to create your own aesthetic world instead of simply relying on your product’s aesthetic or your visual handwriting. A brand’s aesthetic world is infinite: it extends to a pair of sneakers, a piece of furniture, a playlist, and even collaborations.

This expanded meaning of curation makes products only one of the currencies individuals and brands trade in.

The role of a curator is to sort through culture and show us what we need to know and why.

Under pressure for newness, brands struggle to actually create new stuff, but by curating the old, they give it renewed meaning and purpose in consumers’ eyes.

Curation shifts attention from products to the curatorial point of view, which is infinitely more valuable.

This flips the script of brand strategy from product benefits to the story, and makes it imperative for brands to think like curators.

When brands moved from manufacturing products to manufacturing culture, design, luxury and art, curation zoomed onto taste, aesthetics, identity and social status.

Democratization of curation changed the role and value of curators in form, but not in cultural importance.

With a good reason: the aesthetic world and the narrative that curation creates is much harder to replicate than a brand’s visual handwriting and a tone of voice. For Acne Studios, a curatorial point of view lives as a store experience; a carefully chosen influencers and friends of the brand and what architects and interior designers the brand... See more