Ginza on a weekday afternoon. Chanel. Dior. Louis Vuitton. Gucci. Cartier. Bulgari. Glass, gold, polished stone. If there's a street on this planet that has turned the logo into architecture, this is it. And right there, among them, a big store with its name across the front. Muji. Short for Mujirushi Ryohin. No brand, quality goods.
Ginza on a weekday afternoon. Chanel. Dior. Louis Vuitton. Gucci. Cartier. Bulgari. Glass, gold, polished stone. If there's a street on this planet that has turned the logo into architecture, this is it.
And right there, among them, a big store with its name across the front. Muji. Short for Mujirushi Ryohin. No brand, quality goods.
I laughed. Out loud, on the sidewalk, like a tourist who just got the joke. Because I had written that joke, more or less, in 1996.
My master's thesis at the University of Florence was on advertising and branding, through the lens of the sociology of communication. Its core argument was simple. You cannot opt out. Choosing not to have a brand is a brand. Silence is a message. The person who says "I don't care what I wear" is wearing that sentence every morning.
Muji was born as a supermarket house brand in 1980. Forty products. No logos, no packaging theatre. The slogan was honest to the point of being funny: cheap, for a reason.
But look at who they asked to build "nothing." Ikko Tanaka, one of the great graphic designers of Japan. Kazuko Koike on the words. Takashi Sugimoto on the interiors. The best minds in the country, gathered to design the absence of design.
Within three years it had its own store, and it was already a style. People didn't buy Muji in spite of the missing brand. They bought it because of it. The absence became the signature.
And here's the part I love. In those same years, the same retail group behind Muji was bringing Hermès into Japan. No-brand on one shelf, all-brand on the other. Same owners. Not hypocrisy. Just people who understood, better than most, that both are statements.
Steve Jobs knew it too. A black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers, every day. The anti-fashion uniform. Except the turtleneck came from Issey Miyake. Even "I don't think about clothes" had a designer.
Now, the part that changed.
In 1996, a brand lived in places you could control. The ads you bought. The press releases you sent. The catalogue, the shop window, the spokesperson. You wrote the message, and for the most part, the message stayed written.
That world is gone. Today the brand is the post you published and the one you didn't. The photo someone took of you at a conference. The comment under your CEO's interview. The review, the screenshot, the silence after a bad week. For companies, and just as much for people. Every one of us now carries a public persona whether we built it or not.
You can't control that anymore. Nobody can.
But not controlling something is very different from ignoring it. If you don't shape your brand, it gets shaped anyway. By the algorithm, by the loudest person in the room, by whoever happens to be telling your story when you're not.
So where do you start? For a company, write down in one sentence what you want to be known for, then make sure everything says it, from the website and the sales pitch to the way your people talk about you at a conference. Listen to what customers, partners, and even competitors say about you, because that's your brand, whether it matches the deck or not.
For a person, the same rules apply on a smaller stage. Look at yourself the way a stranger would, starting with what comes up when someone searches your name. And choose consistency over volume. One clear voice, repeated over time, is what people end up remembering.
Muji didn't escape branding. It mastered it, and made "nothing" the most deliberate thing in the room.
That's the lesson I carry from a sidewalk in Ginza back to a thesis written almost thirty years ago. You will always be saying something. The only real choice is whether you say it on purpose.
Stay imperfect, stay human.
— Marco Ciappelli
This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.
So I'm in Ginza, Tokyo. You know, Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Cartier, Bulgari. It's one of the most branded streets on the planet, and right in the middle of it, a huge store with its name across the front: Muji, short for Mujirushi Ryohin. No brand, quality goods. That's what it means.
I laughed out loud, because I wrote about this in 1996. My master's thesis was on advertising and branding through the lens of the sociology of communication. The argument was simple: choosing not to have a brand is a brand. Saying nothing is still saying something. You just can't opt out.
Muji is the proof. 1980, a supermarket house brand, forty products. The slogan: cheap, for a reason. But look who they hired to build no brand. Ikko Tanaka, one of Japan's greatest graphic designers. Kazuko Koike on the words. Takashi Sugimoto on the interiors. The best in the country to design nothing, something with no brand.
Three years later, its own store, already a style. And the best part? The same retail group was bringing Hermès into Japan. No brand on one shelf, all brand on the other. Same owners.
When you look back, in 1996 a brand was the ads you bought and the press releases you sent. You controlled the message. Today, everyone is talking. Every post, every photo, every comment, every silence. What you write, what you wear. Even the clothes that say "I don't care about fashion" say exactly that. For a company, and for you.
You just can't control it anymore, but you can't ignore it either. You can leave it to chance and let others write it for you, or you can shape it on purpose. That's what my new newsletter is all about.
So follow me, read this article, this newsletter, and subscribe to my channels, because we're going to talk about branding quite a bit. Stay tuned.