I want to describe a meeting I've been in. Not one specific meeting. A meeting that happens in every design-led business I've worked in and that I keep hearing about from the founders I talk to.
The product is good. The margins are healthy. The brand has something most competitors would kill for: people who actively want to buy deeper into it. Not just willing to pay the price. Looking for ways to go further in. The kind of customers who choose the highest specification not because they need it, but because they want more of the brand. Who'd commission a completely bespoke version if you offered one. Who aren't buying a product so much as buying a piece of something they want to belong to.
And then someone opens a spreadsheet.
They point at a line item. A material cost that's three times the alternative. A retail space that doesn't optimise for footfall. Packaging that costs more than some competitors' entire products. The part of the creative team that doesn't produce anything for sale, the experimental work, the pieces that exist to push the thinking forward rather than generate revenue.
And they ask: "Can we justify this?"
It's a reasonable question. It sounds responsible, even helpful. It's the kind of question that gets asked in every well-run business, and the person asking it is usually doing their job properly.
Here's the problem. The question has a blind spot built into it.
I spent a decade at Jaguar Land Rover working at the intersection of brand strategy and product. And what I kept seeing from inside that machine was how often the most commercially powerful decisions in the business were exactly the ones being challenged hardest by the finance teams and engineering-minded people around them. Not because those people were incompetent. Because they genuinely believed cheaper alternatives would be fine.
They couldn't see what the expensive choice was doing. And because they couldn't see it, they assumed it wasn't doing anything.
My job, or the part of my job I cared about most, was identifying which of those fights were worth picking. Which decisions were load-bearing. Because not every expensive choice is essential. But some of them are holding the whole architecture up, and the people pushing to cut them had no way of knowing which was which.
I think most founders of design-led businesses know this intuitively. They can feel it. They've watched it happen. But when they're sat across from someone asking "can we justify this?", feeling it isn't enough. You need a way to explain why the question is incomplete without making the person asking it feel stupid.
That's the bit nobody teaches you.
Let me give you some examples, because I think they make the point better than I can in the abstract.
Moncler has a boutique in Courchevel. Not in the village. On the ski slopes. You arrive in boots with snow on your jacket. As a piece of retail strategy, it's almost comically inefficient. Limited footfall, seasonal, inaccessible to anyone who isn't actively skiing.
A spreadsheet would flag it immediately. Revenue per square metre? Terrible. Cost of operation relative to a high street location? Indefensible.
But Moncler was founded in a mountain village near Grenoble in 1952. They made their first down jackets for factory workers at altitude. That store isn't a marketing stunt. It's the brand in its original context. You don't go to Moncler in Courchevel. You encounter it while doing the thing their products were made for.
The trust that creates, the feeling that this brand belongs here, isn't something you can capture in a spreadsheet cell. But it's the reason someone buys a Moncler jacket instead of choosing any number of technically equivalent alternatives.
The spreadsheet sees the cost of the store. It can't see what that store is doing to the way people feel about Moncler everywhere else.
Then there's Jonathan Anderson, who admitted something interesting when he became the creative director of Dior. He said he used to think couture was irrelevant. Too expensive, too niche, too disconnected from commercial reality.
Then he spent time in the atelier and his mind was changed. He started describing couture as a lab, a space where freedom from commercial pressure produces the vision and direction for everything the house makes.
On a spreadsheet, Dior's couture operation looks like pure cost with no return. It will never turn a profit. The collection is shown in person to a few hundred people and most of the pieces will never be worn outside a runway. On paper, it's a ridiculous thing to fund.
But here's what I find fascinating. While Anderson is pushing couture further into experimental territory at the top, Dior is simultaneously expanding its entry-level offer. More accessories under €1,000. More bags under €4,000. A 27% increase in accessible pieces over the past three years.
Most boards would look at those two moves and see a contradiction. Spending more on something that will never sell while also reaching downmarket? That looks like strategic confusion.
I see it as one coherent move. The mythology Anderson creates at the top is what makes a pair of earrings three levels down feel like they belong to something. Without that, the accessible offer is just product at a price point. With it, it's an entry into a world.
The lab funds the ladder. The ladder funds the lab.
A spreadsheet can model the cost of couture. It can model the revenue from accessories. What it can't model is the relationship between them. And that relationship is the entire strategy.
So what's actually going on here?
The issue isn't that finance people are wrong. Their tools aren't wrong. A spreadsheet is an extraordinarily good instrument for measuring what it was designed to measure: direct costs, direct revenues, direct returns.
The problem is that in a design-led business, most of the value creation is indirect. And indirect doesn't mean invisible. It means you have to follow the chain.
Take a material choice. Say you're using a leather that costs three times more than the alternative your commercial team keeps suggesting. On a spreadsheet, that's a cost problem. Three times the input, same retail price, margin shrinks.
But the leather sits on the part of the product your customer touches every single time they use it. It's the first physical contact they have with the brand, over and over, day after day. And it feels different from the cheaper version. Not in a way most people could articulate, but in a way they register. It feels like someone thought about them. Like the person who chose this material understood what it would be like to live with this product, not just buy it.
That feeling builds trust. Trust that the brand cares about the details they can't see as much as the ones they can. Trust that compounds into loyalty, into repeat purchases, into the kind of relationship where the customer doesn't need convincing next time. They already know. And they tell someone else.
Now look at what the spreadsheet saw. A material cost three times higher than the alternative. That's it. That's all it could show. The entire chain from that leather to a customer who comes back three years later and brings a friend, all of that happened in the space the spreadsheet can't see.
Each link in that chain is real. Each one can be observed. But the spreadsheet only picks up the first link and the last. The cost coming out and the revenue going in. Everything in between, the part where the value is actually being created, falls into a gap the tool wasn't built to measure.
It's not that the spreadsheet is wrong. It's that the spreadsheet is a map without contour lines.
It shows you distance and direction perfectly well. What it can't show you is elevation. And if you're navigating terrain with hills, valleys, and cliffs, a map without contour lines will tell you the route is clear right up until you walk off the edge.
Here's where this gets personal for founders.
If you run a design-led business, you've probably been in that meeting. Someone has pointed at your most important creative decision and asked you to justify it. And you've felt something tighten in your chest because you know it matters, you know it's right, but you can't explain why in a way that survives the conversation.
So you say something like "it's what makes us us." Or "it's the soul of the brand." Or you get defensive and say "you don't understand what we do."
None of those work. The first sounds vague. The second sounds precious. The third sounds like you're hiding.
The reason they don't work isn't because you're wrong about the decision. It's because you're answering the wrong question. When someone asks "can we justify this cost?", the answer isn't to defend the cost. It's to reframe what they're looking at.
That material, the one that costs three times more? Start there. Start with what it is, where it sits, what it does to the experience of using the product every day. Walk them through the chain. The feel. The trust. The loyalty. The repeat purchase. The referral. And then show them the margin at the end and ask: where do you think that came from?
If you remove the material, you don't save money. You lose the reason someone pays what they pay. If you close the expensive retail space, you don't reduce overhead. You remove the context that makes every other touchpoint feel worth it. If you cut the experimental creative work, you don't eliminate waste. You hollow out the thing that separates you from being just another product at a price point.
Not "trust me, it matters." But "here's the commercial architecture you're not seeing, and here's what happens when you remove a load-bearing wall."
The typical response to this tension, the one I hear from consultants and board advisors, is that creative founders need to "learn business." Get better at spreadsheets. Speak the CFO's language. Become more commercially literate.
I'd push back on that. Not because commercial literacy doesn't matter. It does. But because the advice assumes the spreadsheet is complete and the founder is the one missing something.
What if it's the other way round?
What if the founder's instinct is actually the more complete picture, and the spreadsheet is the one with the gap? Not because numbers don't matter, but because the numbers being measured aren't the right ones for this type of business?
The tools we use to evaluate investment were largely built for a time when businesses could treat the product and the brand as separate concerns. When you could optimise production without touching perception. When cost reduction was always margin improvement.
In a design-led business, that separation doesn't exist. The material, the process, the environment, the experience, these aren't concerns that sit underneath the brand. They are the brand. You can't strip one back without diminishing the other. And the spreadsheet, built for a world where these could be separated, simply can't see the connection.
That's not an argument against measurement. It's an argument for better measurement. For finding ways to capture the indirect value that creative decisions create, rather than pretending they don't exist because the current tools can't see them.
The analogy that helps it stick in my head is a designer being handed a tool that can't measure curves and being asked to evaluate a product full of them. They wouldn't conclude the curves were wrong. They'd conclude the tool was incomplete.
That's where we are with how most businesses evaluate creative investment. The tool is incomplete. And instead of upgrading the tool, we're asking founders to straighten the curves.
The brands that resist that pressure, the ones that keep the expensive material, protect the creative lab, maintain the inaccessible retail space, are not being indulgent. They're being precise about where their value actually comes from.
And the brands that give in? The ones that let someone value-engineer the soul out of the product to improve a quarterly number?
They usually discover, about eighteen months later, that the margin they were trying to protect has disappeared. Because it was never coming from efficiency. It was coming from the choice they cut.
If any of this sounds familiar, I'd start with one question.
What's the most expensive creative decision in your business that someone keeps trying to kill? The one that comes up in every budget review. The one that gets circled in red and questioned every quarter.
Now ask yourself: what would actually happen if you removed it? Not to this quarter's numbers. To the brand next year. To the reason someone chooses you over the alternative. To the story your product tells before anyone opens their mouth.
If removing it would save money but cost you the reason people pay what they pay, you don't have a cost problem.
You have a measurement problem. And that's worth fixing.
scott morgan · parallax thinking
If you're wrestling with this, let's talk.