First I mastered the old way. Then I lost it, and spent a decade learning a better one.
This is the work that came after—and where it came from.
The House of AïA, Playa del Carmen
During COVID, most luxury properties went quiet. Palmaïa had just launched, they could not afford to disappear.
So I stayed on. We ran paid social, grew organic search tenfold in seven months, and achieved 600% ROAS.
The Bee Token, San Francisco
In early crypto, everyone had a white paper. Few had belief. I helped turn Bee Token into something people could understand and trust at speed—a launch that closed its $15M raise in ten minutes.
Vabene, Italy
A heritage marque watch company, rebuilt as a rebel—and carried into Asia with a flood of new investment.
The Pattern
Different categories. Same problem.
A resort no one knew how to explain. A token sale that had to earn trust instantly. A watch brand with heritage but no point of view.
In each case, the work was not to make the thing look better. It was to find the idea strong enough to organize everything around it—name, image, language, symbol, campaign, experience, and memory.
That is the work: not decoration, not content, not a prettier surface. A point of view made real.
What Beauty Couldn’t Teach Me
The work was a dream—extraordinary clients, breathtaking places, beautiful images. And after a decade in luxury, it had taught me everything except the thing that mattered most…
Among them:
Hotel Cipriani, Venice. Le Meurice, Paris. Bvlgari, Milan. La Mamounia, Marrakech. Villa d'Este, Lake Como. Copacabana Palace, Rio de Janeiro. The Ritz, Madrid. Hotel Eden, Rome. The Gstaad Palace. Hotel Splendido, Portofino. Principe di Savoia, Milan. '21', New York. Château de la Chèvre d'Or, Èze. Grand Hotel Europe, St. Petersburg. Reid's Palace, Madeira. Le Montreux Palace, Montreux. Palazzo Sasso, Ravello. Caruso, Amalfi Coast. Villa San Michele, Fiesole. Villa La Massa, Florence. Lapa Palace, Lisbon. Lausanne Palace, Lausanne. Le Maquis, Corsica. Las Dunas, Málaga. Amathus Beach Hotel, Cyprus. Vila Sol, Algarve. Hotel das Cataratas, Iguassu Falls. Maroma, Riviera Maya. El Encanto, Santa Barbara. Casa de Sierra Nevada, San Miguel de Allende. Esperanza, Cabo. The Windsor Court, New Orleans.
Beautiful. And interchangeable with a hundred others. That was the problem.
I went to San Francisco to open Genius-Loci's first American office. It failed, and the crash took the rest. So I started over: an MFA in design, and years spent taking brands apart to understand what makes people believe in them, choose them, remember them.
I could make any place look extraordinary. The second decade taught me the harder thing—how to make one impossible to forget. It’s how I developed my method.
What I do now
I use the method to give clients the story, tension, symbolism, atmosphere, and emotional logic to stand apart—then carry it through the customer journey in a way they’ll never forget.