The Brand Whisperer: Bob Sheard and the future designers need to build

After decades spent reshaping the world’s biggest brands – from Levi’s to Rapha – Bob Sheard believes it’s time to open-source what he knows.

By Jorinde Croese

At first glance, Bob Sheard doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d be hailed as a branding visionary. He talks more like a contrarian uncle than a consultant, punctuating his points with expletives, horror stories from sports brands, and moral imperatives about capitalism. But beneath the bravado is something softer: someone who has spent 25 years inside the machine, and now wants to help redesign it.

A teenage market trader in Bradford turned denim dealer turned creative director by 27, Sheard has done things most people in branding only dream about. He helped shape Converse and Karrimor in the 90s, built FreshBritain into a consultancy trusted by Levi’s, Arc’teryx, and LVMH, and became the kind of person CEOs fly out for last-ditch interventions when a brand has lost its soul. Now, in his latest act, he’s written The Brand New Future, a book that sets out to share the playbook he’s used to reposition over 250 brands. Not because he wants to impress anyone, but because – as he puts it – “we need 250,000 new ones that are actually fit for the world we’re heading into.”

Sheard’s ideas are sharp, often provocative. He doesn’t believe most fashion brands understand strategy, he’s skeptical of founders who name brands after themselves, frustrated by how design schools avoid teaching commercial realities, and insistent that values – not business plans – are the only durable foundation. For students, early-career founders, and anyone thinking about brand-building post-2020, Sheard’s work offers not just a framework, but a call to rethink what success even looks like.

On building a brand

For Sheard, the worst mistake a designer can make is building something they think they should want, instead of something they actually believe in. “I ask people: ‘If someone started a brand based on your actual life – your friends, your values, your story – what would that look like?’” he says. “And they look at me blankly.”

He doesn’t buy into the idea that brand-building is some mysterious process. To him, a brand is a belief system made visible: a point of view that’s strong enough to say no as often as it says yes. “You need friction. You need a real enemy. Sometimes that’s a competitor. Sometimes it’s a mindset.”

That sense of conviction, he believes, is what allows brands to create not just products but cultural infrastructure: rituals, aesthetics, and symbols that help people make sense of the world. And while most early-stage designers obsess over visuals and identity decks, Sheard insists that the subconscious is where loyalty is actually formed. “Most decisions aren’t rational,” he says. “You don’t wear Arc’teryx because of a GORE-TEX breakdown chart. You wear it because you feel like you belong to something.”

Take Rapha, for example. It isn’t simply built around cycling as a sport – it is built around a feeling of transformation. “It is positioned differently to football culture,” he says. “It is about suffering, solitude, and grace. It is about the road, the ritual, the escape.” The result? A brand that didn’t just sell jerseys, but rewired the emotional identity of road cycling itself.

Another example: a small-batch Scotch whisky client who insisted their brand should be “about legacy.” Sheard wasn’t convinced. “I asked them: what if your legacy isn’t your grandfather’s recipe, but the conversations that happen while drinking it?” That shift – from origin myth to living experience – reframed the entire brand. It moved them from nostalgia to relevance.

He breaks it down simply: feel vs think. A good brand should have both. “Feel is tribe, language, tension, belief. Think is layout, hierarchy, logo. But if you don’t get the feel right, you’ve just made a very expensive, very empty shell.” For fashion students raised on moodboards and metrics, this shift – from decoration to meaning – can be uncomfortable. But Sheard sees it as necessary. “Stop trying to impress the algorithm. Start designing from a place that actually fucking matters to you.”

On fast fashion and planned obsolescence

In Sheard’s world, brands don’t just sell products – they shape values. Which is why he’s deeply critical of how most fashion businesses still operate. “There’s a moral crime in designing obsolescence,” he says. “In creating things that are deliberately made to be replaced.”

He believes growth itself needs rethinking. Not just slowed down, but redesigned. “We’ve spent decades measuring success by volume: how much you sell, how fast you scale, how many markets you enter,” he says. “But what if growth meant something else entirely? What if it meant growing in depth, in cultural impact, in usefulness?”

He’s not naive about what that requires. It means resisting investor pressure. Saying no to short-term wins. Building teams and timelines that allow for nuance. “I get it. Fast fashion is seductive. You make something, you get feedback, you move. But what’s the cost of that speed, creatively and culturally?”

For him, the better question is no longer how to do less harm, but how to do more good. “Design something that makes the world richer, not just your bottom line,” he says. “Otherwise you’re just adding to the noise.”

He sees the same issue playing out in brand storytelling, too. “Most people are just cobbling together nice language after the fact. The belief comes after the product,” he says. “But if you don’t start with something that matters, nothing you bolt on later will ever quite stick.”

How to kill a jacket and start a movement

One of Sheard’s favourite origin stories is that of Arc’teryx, the cult Canadian outerwear brand he helped rebrand. “The founders were seven completely dysfunctional guys, chaos everywhere,” he says. “But when they came together, they were like a wolf pack.” Their north star wasn’t market share. It was vengeance. “Once, they sat around a table, threw a Patagonia jacket in the middle and said, ‘This is shit. We’re going to kill it.’ That was their rallying cry.” That level of clarity, however brutal, is something Sheard respects. “That kind of obsessive focus, that sense of mission, it’s what makes a brand worth caring about.”

On fashion’s future (and what happens after CSM)

Sheard has little patience for self-mythologising creatives. “Most of the time, you’re not a genius,” he says. “You’re a designer trying to make something that connects.” He doesn’t mean that dismissively. But he’s wary of how the fashion industry clings to hero narratives and hierarchies, even as the cultural and technological ground beneath it shifts.

Nowhere is that tension more visible than in education. His relationship with Central Saint Martins stretches back over a decade, and he’s both a believer in its legacy and deeply frustrated by its infrastructure. “You have this huge institution,” he says, “but most of the tutors are underpaid and overworked. They’re freelancing just to survive. Meanwhile, students are paying tens of thousands and getting five-minute tutorials twice a week.”

He doesn’t blame the teachers – he blames the system. And it’s one he’s trying to supplement, if not fully subvert. His idea of mentorship isn’t locked inside academia. It’s peer-to-peer. Open-source. “We’ve got to stop gatekeeping knowledge,” he says, and the book is a testament to that. He’s also building a short course aimed at C-suite brand leaders, but the goal isn’t exclusivity. It’s clarity. “If we want designers to create meaningful brands, we need to give them tools, not just critique. Not just aesthetics.”

Part of that also means acknowledging that the role of the creative is changing. AI is one piece of that puzzle. “It’s not about having answers anymore,” he says. “It’s about knowing the right questions to ask, so you can guide the machines.” In a world where output is infinite, he believes judgement and direction will be the true differentiators. “Mid-level creativity is under threat. But vision? Vision is harder to automate.”

He sees this as a call for designers to zoom out. Not just to focus on what they make, but why they’re making it, and what future their choices help shape. “You’re not here to replicate what already exists,” he says. “You’re here to lead.”

From sustainability to regeneration

That shift in mindset isn’t just creative – it’s systemic. If the role of the designer is changing, so too must the definition of progress. Sheard argues that we’ve misunderstood what sustainability should mean. “Sustainability has become a marketing crutch,” he says. “It’s about minimising harm. Regeneration is about adding value – social, environmental, emotional.”

In his view, most brands are still obsessed with optics: swapping plastic for paper, launching capsule collections made from recycled polyester, shouting about supply chain audits. “It’s all subtraction,” he says. “Less waste, less guilt, less impact. But the future belongs to brands that are additive.”

Regeneration, for Sheard, means thinking like a gardener rather than a factory. It’s about creating conditions for growth – not just revenue growth, but growth of culture, ecosystems, meaning. That means asking better questions:

• What am I giving back to the system I’m drawing from?

• What am I cultivating that didn’t exist before?

• Would the world be poorer if this brand didn’t exist?

In practice, this can manifest in many ways. It might look like designing garments that can be repaired indefinitely, not replaced. Or brands that share manufacturing resources with emerging designers. It could mean working with local dye plants to reintroduce forgotten agricultural knowledge into a rural area, or training communities in design thinking, so they can build their own economic autonomy.

Crucially, it’s not just about product. “If you want to be regenerative, you have to think about systems,” Sheard says. “Product, people, planet, power – all of it has to line up. Otherwise, you’re just doing sustainability theatre.”

He also believes regenerative brands are often slower, smaller, more intimate by design. “That’s not a compromise. That’s the point,” he says. “There’s dignity in going deep instead of wide. In doing one thing brilliantly, and making it truly matter.”

For young designers coming out of fashion school into a collapsing climate and an oversaturated market, this vision is radical – and strangely hopeful. It suggests that a better way is not only possible, but powerful. Not a limitation, but a creative challenge. “You’re not just here to be less bad,” Sheard says. “You’re here to make something good. Something alive.”

Designing with depth: Sheard’s framework

For all his metaphors and big-picture thinking, Sheard is surprisingly practical when it comes to brand-building. He developed a four-part model to help founders cut through the noise and get to the heart of what their brand actually is. It’s not a brand book but a belief engine.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• World: What is the cultural or emotional landscape your brand exists in? What problem, tension, or desire does it speak to?

• Authority: Why are you the right person to bring this to life? What’s your unique lens, experience, or credibility? This isn’t about credentials, it’s about emotional ownership.

• Personality: If your brand were a person, how would it talk, behave, disagree? What’s its tone of voice? Its rhythm? Its style of confrontation?

• Purpose: What change do you want to create? Not a slogan, but a shift. What will your brand do for the world that didn’t exist before?

Sheard often says that these four elements, once defined, should guide every single decision – from casting a lookbook to responding to a DM. “If it doesn’t align with the belief system,” he says, “don’t do it.”

It’s a framework designed not to box creatives in, but to help them build something coherent and durable. Because when you know what you stand for, you stop reacting, and start leading.

Legacy, serendipity, and the power of doing something

For someone who’s been in countless C-suite boardrooms, Sheard remains surprisingly grounded in his origin story. A kid from Bradford who once sold shirts at a market stall, he still believes in working harder than anyone else in the room. His father’s mantra – “Do nothing, nothing happens. Do something, something happens” – has become his guiding principle.

He’s not interested in mystique or gatekeeping. If anything, he’s spent his later career trying to dismantle the idea that brand-building is a dark art. What he offers isn’t a fixed set of rules, but a way of seeing – one that favours clarity over cleverness, substance over spin. And while his frameworks are tight, there’s a poetic side to Sheard too. He believes in timing, in accidents, in the quiet alignment of moments. “Serendipity is just momentum plus openness,” he says. “You have to be in motion. You have to be paying attention.”