Part 1: You don't need a logo to start a business.

Why designing an identity before establishing meaning is…well…a waste of money

Contrary to popular assumption, most governments do not require a logo or letterhead to register a business. It’s not a legal requirement. A letterhead is a signifier of legitimacy and administrative readiness. It’s functional; designed to certify, not just circulate. Sometimes it requires one as part of the registration process. But a logo? Almost never.

And yet, it’s usually the first thing people ask me for.

Commercial stories evolve. They change shape. Look at Canon, from its first mark to what it is today. In 1933, the camera was called ‘Kwanon’; after the Buddhist deity of compassion. When they decided to go global, they dropped the goddess and registered the name ‘Canon.’ The meaning came first. The simplified logo came after the reputation was already understood.

Why do you think Canon simplified their mark… because they ran out of ideas?

I find that more logos get simplified because they have outgrown the need to explain themselves. The logo followed the business, not the other way around.

So when clients come to me at the early stages of launching, I usually recommend they don’t invest in a logo just yet. Better to invest in writing, photography, and above all, product development. A logo matters, but not for the reasons most people think, and rarely as early as they think it does.

Think of it as the lifespan of a reputation.

At some point in time, somewhere between the Louis Vuitton handbags and Nike caps, the logo became merchandise. And the meaning became equity. Now, a logo is only worth something once it’s earned a reputation or manufactured. More on that later…

It begins with the way you conduct business. The way it offers a solution, shows up, or maybe even simply listens to consumers. These gestures become the business story. And it evolves through repetition and trust. It becomes a reputation. And eventually, it crystallizes into form.

That’s when you invest in a logo… A good one, with all the bells and whistles.

Reputations are manufactured or grown.

Sometimes the entrepreneurs who hire us don’t have the luxury of time. They can’t grow a reputation organically; they need to inform and distribute within a short window. They need to manufacture one.

$6.9 billion reputation…

The Olympics spends hundreds of millions on branding every four years; an entirely new visual identity each cycle, built from scratch, designed to tell a story, about a city, a culture, a moment, etc.

Does it work? Does anyone ever buy a ticket for the logo alone?

Sometimes all you need to do is show up consistently.

Soorya Matchboxes, producing Sri Lanka’s first wax-coated safety matches since 1984; do they need to manufacture a new reputation each time?

Both approaches work. But only one of them requires a logo on day one. And they follow different timelines and different logics.

• A manufactured reputation, like the Olympics, a product launch, a rebrand, these are commissions. There is a clear brief, focused scope, and the goal post can’t move. High effort, high cost, concentrated into a short window. You get something finished. Something you can point to.

  
  

• A lived reputation, like Soorya didn’t commission their brand equity; they accumulated it. And the businesses that grow that way don’t usually need a single expensive solution. They need ongoing support.

  
  

That’s the model we’ve built our story studio membership around. We learn about our members, offering to help them package and distribute their stories consistently over time. Lower cost, higher value in the long run. In the end, they get a very good logo and everything else along the way.

They are mnemonic

Here’s a simple example: On your way home from work, you remember to buy some tea. You take it home, drink it. Turns out to be the best tea you’ve ever had. A few days later, you run out, go back to the shop and ask for the same one. The shopkeeper points to the shelf and says, ‘Over there, the box that says Zesta.’

Now you are a Zesta Tea person.

The logo didn’t create any experience. It just gave you a way back to it. That’s what a mnemonic does, it doesn’t build the memory, it retrieves one that already exists. The real value is in the association the mark holds. The logo doesn’t create that relationship. It inherits it.

A mnemonic only works when there’s already something to remember.

JK Keller took a self-portrait every single day for 25 years, from age 22 to 47. At a glance, it’s an archive; Then think about the relationship between himself, his practice, and an audience that watched him become something over time. That’s where the real value lives. It’s not in the mark itself, but in the accumulated trust it signifies. The logo doesn’t create that relationship. It inherits it.

Part 2 up next…

This text is an interpretation of a 2026 seminar on the lifespan of commercial stories, delivered for the Academy of Design, Sri Lanka. The seminar was designed to help understand how meaning is seeded, scaled, and sustained. It encourages design for continuity, not just aesthetics; for symbols that circulate, not just certify. So if you’re building something, start with consistency: consistency in product or service, or in story. Show up and let the reputation accumulate until the symbol has something worth inheriting.

The stories we tell in moments of crisis

A story that’s not relevant to the audience might as well not be told.

Building relevance is finding where a story belongs in the moment it is released, and whether it respects the emotional weather its audience is currently living through. When a major event shifts the collective mindset, we often reshape stories to meet it. Stories do not exist in isolation; they exist inside time, place, and shared experience. When the ground moves, socially, politically, and environmentally, stories that ignore that movement risk feeling hollow, performative, or worse, indifferent.

When Sri Lanka was shaken up by the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah, several stories being produced in our studio for the island's audiences were paused and carefully reconsidered to assess whether they were appropriate, necessary, and true to the moment.

In situations like this, we talk to our clients to understand their genuine responses to the ongoing situation, and refer back to the values of their brand articulation framework before reshaping stories to be relevant, sensitive and respectful to what’s happening in the daily lives of their audience. This process is about maintaining honesty and sensitivity in stories, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than rush to fill silence.

For some businesses, the stories were a direct channel to support relief efforts and offer solidarity. Our role as story makers was to extract their genuine sentiments and efforts and bring them into story formats that matched their most successful communication platforms; seen in this example is one such story made to call for relief support through Instagram. It channelled Black Cat's Caregiver and Lover archetypal persona.

In the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka, we reshaped or completely restructured planned stories to imbue sensitivity, relief efforts and helpful insight into the stories of client businesses; to give shape to their grief, empathy, and solidarity through stories, while staying true to their voice and values. This didn’t mean turning every story into commentary or every business into a spokesperson. Stories can acknowledge loss without exploiting it. They can offer support without centering themselves. They can point toward relief, resources, or collective care without pretending to be heroes. Stories should be genuine acts of participation rather than declarations.

Often, this means slowing down production, stripping stories back to their core intention, and asking what role, if any, they should play right now. Sometimes the answer is to offer support, relief, or insight. Sometimes it is to step aside altogether. And yes, this process costs us extra in production time, but we’d rather do more for better stories than maintain strict build cycles for so-so outcomes.

In some cases, it was about offering insight; in Rithihi's case, being a brand with a dominant Sage archetype, offering insight into the culture of giving was a genuine response that stemmed from the business itself. We only create the longform stories for the Rithihi blog, while their in-house team handles the blog formatting and what's published on social media. But, we always offer capsule versions of the longform stories designed by us, to point their audience to the blog; like this one.

Being able to express, connect, and mobilize is important for entrepreneurs and businesses in moments of collective crisis. Not because businesses must suddenly become moral authorities, but because they are part of the social fabric. They employ people, serve communities, and operate within shared systems that are also affected by disruption. This is because the work they do always starts as a response to the society and the world they inhabit. No business is created in a vacuum. Products, services, and ideas emerge from specific needs, tensions, and cultural conditions. When those conditions change, responding thoughtfully is not a deviation from the work; it’s a continuation of it.

That’s what makes responding to the realities of our world an extension of the work of a business; it’s not CSR, it’s not charity, nor is it being exceptional. It is simply being alive and responsive to the world a business shares with its audience. Responsiveness is not about virtue-signalling; it is about relevance, respect, and responsibility.

Stories that a business tells are a big part of these living, real, and relevant conversations that it has with its audience. Stories are where values become visible, where intent is tested against reality, and where trust is either strengthened or eroded.

The wheel of our world, the myth of the protector and how our climate narrative must evolve

Insights for narrative shift, drawn after a tropical climate catastrophe

After Cyclone Ditwah raged through Sri Lanka, causing floods, landslides, displacement, and immense losses in life and infrastructure, an old belief resurfaced. This is that, if the country’s leader is immoral, the natural balance will be disturbed, causing havoc. This is a belief that has resurfaced in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of every natural disaster, mostly through habit and occasionally with a political agenda. As ridiculous as the idea sounds, it stems from Sri Lanka’s agro-utopianism and a wider pan-South Asian concept of ultimate balance. Here, the role of a society’s leader was to maintain the delicate symbiosis between the environment and community, enabling natural cycles to flow in sync with human needs. This is an exploration of that narrative, the collective desire it stems from, and how it should shift to facilitate climate justice today.

Origins: Chakravarti, the wheel-turner

This belief that the leader is responsible for the environmental balance stems from the pan-South Asian concept of the ‘Chakravarti’.

The Indian Emperor Asoka is perhaps the most widely associated historic figure with the title ‘Chakravarti’.

From a mythic-symbolic lens, Chakravarti suggests a ruler whose legitimacy comes not merely from lineage and military power, but from social-environmental stewardship. As defined in ancient South Asian political-religious tradition, Chakravarti means  ‘wheel-turner’. The ‘wheel’ inherent to the meaning of the title is simultaneously a symbol of empire and of Dharma; the moral-cosmic order that includes land, people, seasons, and ecology. In that framework, a Chakravarti’s duty would extend to ensuring the balance of natural systems, including rains, fertility, harvest cycles, and justice, because sovereignty meant harmony between human society and the land.

These mythic stories that invest a single ruler with stewardship over nature reflect the ancient human longing for a ‘just patron’ of land: one whose power is tempered by responsibility, whose rule upholds not only people but the ecosystem, ensuring the survival and sustainability of all. That symbolism stayed embedded in the cultural imagination long after that political structure dissolved.

In Sri Lankan epigraphic tradition, rulers of the Polonnaruwa period and later used the title ‘Chakravarti’ (or its Sinhalised equivalent ‘sakvithi’) in inscriptions, reflecting a claim to the island's sovereignty and implying the management of the natural and human systems that enabled the success of its deeply agrarian society. 

The Chakravarti dynasty of Northern Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Kingdom is another example of local monarchs who adopted this idea to signify their roles.

But, the reality today is that the cause of the imbalance we face is not home-grown, and the responsibility of turning the wheel is not centred in a singular unit. Now we know that the idea of an intergovernmental monolith, single government, head of state or industrial power maintaining the balance we all seek is a fallacy. The cause is global and widespread; the responsibility lies with the collective. And it often starts with the narrative we’ve come to accept.

Aftermath: mobilizing for climate justice 

Sri Lanka contributes less than 0.03% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the world’s top emitters, just a handful of nations, account for nearly 60%. Yet Sri Lanka ranks among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, disproportionately affected by the effects of global warming, such as floods, droughts, cyclones carrying extreme moisture, rising seas, and unpredictable monsoons.

This is especially true because Ditwah’s severity was not accidental. The cyclone itself, classified as weak in strength, was not the main cause of destruction, but the resulting rainfall and floods. The reason why even the weak cyclone was able to pick up such an extreme amount of moisture that was released on Sri Lanka as the winds made landfall was due to ocean waters warmed by emissions. The warmed ocean acted as a reservoir of energy and moisture that intensified the storm’s rainfall and flooding far beyond what would have occurred in balanced climatic conditions. Heavy rainfall events are significantly amplified by human-driven warming, with atmospheric moisture increasing as the air holds more water vapour as temperatures rise. This direct link between rising ocean heat and extreme storms points to rising risk for some countries, especially islands. In 2015, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) identified Sri Lanka as the South Asian country with the highest relative risk of disaster-related displacement. Industries whose emissions have driven most of the world’s warming bear greater responsibility for the conditions that make disasters like Ditwah more frequent and more severe for vulnerable nations.

Our collective longing behind the ideal of a protector who maintains harmonious cycles should be redirected. Not toward expectation, and certainly not toward blame, but toward an urgent and collective call for climate justice to take responsibility in shaping safer futures. 

Forward: from favour to fairness

It’s in this light that relief support, reparations, climate financing, and infrastructure development are not acts of charity; they are fair and owed exchanges to restore the balance disrupted by a few to the despair of so many. Especially for the industries whose emissions have played the greatest role in shaping the volatile climate we all inhabit today, it’s part of a shared responsibility that can no longer be ignored.

When we see post-disaster assistance as mere generosity, we unintentionally lower the expectations of what a fair global system should provide. The support Sri Lanka receives now should be a doorway to initiate conversations on long-term financing, funding and sharing technology for rainwater management, climate-resilient infrastructure, and disaster-response systems that match the scale of the losses countries like ours face. And crucially, responsibility is not only about emergency aid and reparations; it’s also about using the loss and devastation caused by erratic climates to push global reforms. These are essential elements of the justice owed and a recognition of our interconnected fate. This is not a favour, but fairness.

For everyday citizens, seeking climate justice begins with a shift in narrative. Disasters like Ditwah are not acts of divine displeasure or signs of domestic failure; they are symptoms of a global imbalance that can only be corrected when there is a collective call for justice and a responsibility is shared more equitably. Justice means ensuring that recovery invests in the most affected communities, that development does not sacrifice ecosystems, and that nations and industries respond proportionately to the damage their emissions have helped create.

The balance we once believed rested in the hands of gods and monarchs, today belongs to all of us. When we see support after climate disasters as fairness rather than charity, and we push governments and industries towards climate accountability, we reclaim that older wisdom, and widen the circle of responsibility so that balance becomes possible again. It all begins with shifting the narrative to be more truthful; that climate justice is fairness, not favour.