SUNDAY MORNING
Slow by design
Last time I walked the Golden gate Bridge I was a kid!
Happy Sunday, friends!
When I was just starting out in my career, I thought work travel was the most exciting thing ever. I couldn't wait to be asked on my first trip. Fast forward a few years (okay, more than a few) and I can confirm the shine has well and truly worn off.
From the outside it looks pretty glamorous. You get to see a new city, work foots the bill, maybe you even fly business class and expense your meals. Sounds nice, doesn't it? But I think people mix up vacation travel and work travel all the time. Work travel is meetings, prepping for meetings, and then networking after the meetings. Repeat until your flight home.
And that's pretty much been my whole week in San Francisco, so work has been on my mind nonstop. The upside of working in marketing, though, is that part of the job is keeping a pulse on what brands are up to. Which means a lot of my time goes to reading articles and the news.
So today I thought it'd be fun to share a few brands I've come across that are leaning into slowing down and being intentional. When everything around us is racing to be the quickest and the most frictionless, it's honestly so refreshing to see brands challenging convention.
01 · THE RITUAL
Some things are worth the wait
Three brands caught my eye recently, and they couldn't be more different from each other. But they've all figured out that sometimes the slow part is the whole point.
koyia.se
Let's start in a Swedish forest. Perfume brand Koyia opened what its co-founder calls probably the world's slowest store: a tiny perfumery hidden in a clearing in the Småland woods. No staff, no till, not even a street address, just a set of GPS coordinates to find it. And here's my favorite part. You don't pay with money, you pay with time. Instead of 599 kronor, a bottle costs you 599 seconds, which is about ten minutes of just sitting among the pine trees. Even the scents come from the forest around it, made from young spruce shoots.
It was only open over the summer and is closed for now, but they've said it'll be back. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out.