Drawn from in-situ notes taken across Milan Design Week 2025, this article examines the strategic ripples from surface, system, and material logic.
TL;DR
- Design Week 2025 revealed a shift in brand strategy—from polished campaigns to embedded presence. Brands weren’t broadcasting; they were attuning to place, materials, and lived context.
- Effectuation, a strategic model focused on starting with what’s at hand, showed up everywhere—from installations to a humble yellow Esselunga grocery bag.
- The most resonant signals weren’t loud. They were structural. A waxy shade of green, layered uniforms of presence, and bio-regional materials all pointed toward a new logic: marketing that behaves more like infrastructure than message.
MILAN, Italy - The week in Milan revealed less of a launchpad, more of a quietly humming ecosystem. At Design Week 2025 brands were inhabiting ideas. Strategy showed up as an undercurrent.
At Malpensa, a classic Armani campaign met arrivals with something close to architectural poise. Elsewhere: white Versace Odissea sneakers, a Louis Vuitton Keepall, a driver in suede smoking slippers and white chinos—all composed.
What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t part of any installation. It was the Esselunga grocery bag—a real, ordinary object pulled into the design week atmosphere not through strategy decks or moodboards, but simply because it was already there. Ubiquitous. Useful. Effectual.
Tucked under arms, slung over shoulders, bulging with weight, dense with dinner parties. Not an activation. Just evidence—probably from pre-briefing grocery runs.
But everywhere.
Blunt-force branded with bureaucratic chic and a dose of hyperlocal flex. For sure not designed to go viral, it's just so impossible to ignore. Helvetica-on-creatine. It sort of belongs somewhere between retail core and max-saturation nostalgia.
More state-issued than curated.
The logo itself? An artefact of something I call utilitarian maximalism—a visual dialect where functionality flirts with formalism. Bold bashful leather head (IYKYK) That heavyset sans serif? Bureaucratic bravado—Helvetica’s bulkier cousin after three espressos. And the red ‘S’? A structural glyph for movement, service, and surplus. The yellow field reads like caloric warmth—ripeness, commerce, and that almost-sinister cheer of retail brightness under halogen.
There were, of course, the expected displays—installations, collaborations, takeovers. Months of logistics, negotiations, and taste-testing behind each one. But despite all the scaffolding, the outputs didn’t feel overdetermined. Instead: ease. Not casual, but naturalised. Controlled, authentic but without self-consciousness.
It’s here that Effectuation—a lesser-discussed but increasingly useful strategic model—feels relevant. Developed by Saras Sarasvathy, it offers an alternative to top-down, pre-set approaches. It suggests starting with what’s at hand—your network, materials, tools—and proceeding via iteration, not projection.
In Milan, this logic was everywhere.
Strategic Footnote: Effectuation in Practice
Where classic strategy might ask “Where are we going?”, effectuation asks “What can we do with what we’ve already got?”
It thrives in ambiguity. Assumes flux. Leans on co-creation.
It isn’t particularly romantic. But it’s precise—and often more honest.
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Subscribe →Field Observations from Milan Design Week 2025
1. Material Clues and Marketing as Structure
The presence of local grocery bags alongside high-end installations pointed to a kind of design logic built from the everyday. Louis Vuitton’s homeware resembled tropical landscape artefacts than interior design. Under Armour’s moss-lined build with Unless didn’t just use bio-based materials—the entire product was bio-based.
Marketing as structure—where materials, textures, and origin are doing the strategic work. Effectual, not hypothetical. Unpretentious in execution, deliberate in effect.
2. Uniforms as Systems of Presence
The crowd offered its own lesson in semiotics. Lace skirts over trousers. Barbour jackets alongside structured mesh layers. Neutral palettes intersecting with archival sportswear. Prepared, bird in hand.
There’s a language forming—less about dressing, more about composing presence. Rooted somewhere between Kyoto restraint and Tangier diplomacy.
Not uniforms for authority. Uniforms for approach.
There is a perceptible shift in how brands assert credibility. Not through sharp separation or shock, but through shared codes: modular, interpretable, layered.
You may not be able to quickly assess what you’re seeing, but you’re not worried.
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Subscribe →3. Post-Campaign Green
There is a particular shade that threaded through the week. A green that resists Pantone coding. More chlorocentric than chlorophyll. A spectral green. Waxy. Tactile. With the gravity of a decision already made. Non-urgent creations to create reliability.
Really good posture.
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What This Tells Us About Strategy
It all felt like a recalibration of strategic grammar. Catching the tail end of a stranger on FaceTime where someone says, to the person on the other end “I don’t think we need to shout anymore.”
Literacy in how systems hold. Creating ease between product, place, and people that the industry so desperately needs.
For CMOs Guiding a Brand through Complexity:
- What fixed assets—material, tonal, spatial—are you underestimating?
- How do your outputs function in context, not just in campaign isolation?
- Are you using design systems to hold meaning over time?
Airplane Thought
Biologist Janine Benyus once wrote: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” In Milan, that’s what it felt like brands were doing. Not marketing to dominate. But designing to persist.
A strategic biosphere—carefully assembled, rooted, responsive, quietly alive.
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