A creative director's note. Boats, bras, bombs & luxury branding.
We brand companies. Different worlds, different audiences, but the same underlying challenge: understanding what matters to people. Express it in a way that sticks.
I’m obsessed with branding. I see how creativity that feels free-spirited can be shaped into commercial value.
Branding takes something intangible and gives it form. It creates trust, character and turns commerce into something people feel. And I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to it, even before I really knew what it was.
Creative Director, Cohort
Frances Martin-Isaacs
My path into luxury branding wasn’t linear. I studied international law. Four years of it.
On paper, it was a sensible decision. In reality, I spent more time in the darkroom developing photographs than I did in the library. Theatre, art, photography; those were always the real pull for me.
Alongside that, I found myself drawn to early technology. This was the late 90s, when the internet was still in its Netscape phase. Mostly academics, mostly blue and grey, and not particularly glamorous. I ended up writing my dissertation on art as experience and virtual reality, and somewhere in that process the idea clicked: creativity and logic could coexist. That right brain and left brain didn’t have to be in opposition.
That thread has stayed with me ever since.
branding
Chilli No.5
Connecting the dots
My early work moved through PR, management consulting (digging into clients like Cadbury-Schweppes and Boots) and graphic design. I was cutting out newspaper clippings for airline clients one minute, analysing the composition of chocolate bars the next. Learning how businesses actually function behind the scenes. Then leaving it all behind, I moved to Canada with a camera.
That period – filming back country big air, editing interviews with musical legends, working with early digital tools – was a bridge between worlds. Old and new. Analogue and digital. Minidisks became iPods, now streaming.
Back in London, the ad world in Soho had me lugging kit around in the early hours to ‘catch that special light’. I was then asked to build a video department inside a global corporation far earlier than I should have been. But I was the only one who knew how. Around the same time, I experienced my first major rebrand from the inside, distilling the purpose of a global organisation’s purpose into meaningful, consistent messages.
That’s where the power of branding hit me.
How do you bring together the thoughts and beliefs of 60,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of customers across the globe?
Branding. That’s where it all came together.
Learning luxury
I moved to the Côte d’Azur in the early 2000s, right at the beginning of the yachting boom.
From there, things expanded quickly. That became a defining tranche of my career. Working with brokerage houses, shipyards, new entrants and legacy names. A world that taught me about discretion. About nuance. About understanding what people don’t say, as much as what they do. How to speak UHNW+.
To broadened my scope, I moved back to London. I worked and continue to work with everything from family offices to homeless shelters. I worked with startups, tech, property, charities, luxury resorts, fashion, lingerie. Experience that extended into areas I never expected; defence technology.
Different sectors, different sensitivities, but the same questions remain. How do you connect? How does branding sell even the most sensitive of products?
Different worlds. Same principles.
On the surface, they’re completely different worlds. But in reality, the same principles apply. Branding is not so much about the category; it’s about empathy, understanding and listening. It’s about knowing your product and the sensitivities of the market.
Working on military projects blew my mind. The scale and complexity of the messaging, long-form, layered and highly detailed, and the realisation that with the right thinking, it could be harnessed into something simple, precise and powerful. The right words, at the right pitch, can carry enormous weight.
As for the bras… Let’s just say branding comes in all shapes and sizes.
And in all categories, nuance is everything.
The essence of luxury branding
Luxury branding is about creating something that feels considered, because it is. Not decoration. Not trends. Not noise. A rich narrative. A story to connect to. And in doing so, creates real value.
This thinking naturally extends into new territories: wellness, longevity, luxury healthcare. Spaces where the stakes are higher, the decisions more deliberate and the audience discerning.
Luxury branding is not just about how something looks, but how it is experienced, how you move through a brand’s world and what stays with you. It’s also about building measurable business success for stakeholder. Their audiences, the people they want to reach and the impact they want to have. Creating marketing and messaging that connects with a strong voice, spoken at the right pitch.
As an agency, Cohort stays close to the world’s best talent – creatives, thinkers, people who understand what matters now. Not trends. It’s about what’s right and what works. My role as Creative Director, and Cohort’s role as agency partner, is to create in the middle of that. We’re facilitators and conduits between business and creativity, products and consumers, making connections and crafting work that makes people think and feel and businesses succeed.
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“We can all recognise AI text, ChatGPT can’t replace our creative copywriters.
Our luxury creative agency has been harnessing AI to create distinct visual identities.”
Frances Martin-Isaacs, Founder of Cohort