The Magician With Three Hats
Written by Lee Selsick, Director of Strategy & Design
Lee Selsick is a renowned expert in design driven business growth. He is the founder of Next Brand, a Melbourne-based design consultancy, and a thought-leader in leveraging design as a driver of profitability.
Design is a magician, though not one of illusion. Instead, it delivers magical, repeatable, real-world results. In ambitious businesses, under the guise of three different hats, it performs three distinct tricks, each delivering value in a different way: from creating efficiencies, to building loyalty, to driving revenue.
Let’s look at the three hats of design, and the value each one brings.
Hat 1: The architect of flow
Design gets ambitious businesses moving, cleaner, quicker, and smarter.
It’s the ticking in the warehouse that runs like clockwork, a dashboard that shows what matters without the clutter, or a customer journey that flows so smoothly no one even notices the steps. It sharpens tools, streamlines workflows, and keeps teams aligned without a ten-page memo or a standing meeting to explain it.
You’ll see it in faster onboarding, fewer errors, simpler systems, and time saved across the board. It turns bloated processes into neat ones, confusion into clarity, and lag into flow.
Using design effectively creates momentum. It clears bottlenecks, trims the fat, and transforms daily operations into something that just works.
The first trick? Making friction disappear.
Hat 2: The spellbinder
Here’s where the magic gets powerfully strange, and strangely powerful. Design and branding have the ability to create emotional relationships with products and services that are, at their core, inanimate or even abstract ideas.
Through design, products, services, and entire businesses take on personality. They’re given values, presence, and a kind of charm. And somehow, people respond, not just passively, but actively, with loyalty and, often, fierce emotion.
Employees begin to feel proud of where they work. Customers feel a sense of connection. Investors gain confidence. Suppliers hustle to jump on board.
A well-designed brand becomes the person we want it to be: consistent, trustworthy, and expressive. It becomes a rallying point, a symbol of shared belief. And that belief has commercial consequences.
The second trick? Creating human connections with the abstract and intangible.
Hat 3: The alchemist
This is the flashiest trick, the one everyone sees.
Design makes more people choose your product. And it makes them willing to pay more for it. Not because it’s cheaper, faster, or technically better, but because it feels better. Like it fits. Like it understands them. Like it will make their life better.
Great design turns a product into an experience, something considered, cohesive, and emotionally resonant. It doesn’t just deliver; it elevates. It creates functional, emotional, or even self-expressive value.
And when people believe in what they’re buying, when they perceive value, price stops being a problem.
The results aren’t just anecdotal. According to The Business Value of Design by McKinsey & Company, design-led companies outperform their peers by up to two-to-one in both revenue growth and shareholder returns.
Design creates preference. It builds market share. It creates pricing power. And it delivers value that shows up in the numbers.
The third trick? Turning perception into profit.
The reveal
So, what do we have?
Lower costs through clarity and efficiency.
Stronger relationships across every audience.
Higher revenue through preference and pricing power.
The magician lifts the final cloth, and there it is, a business that runs smoother, grows faster, and delivers more value at every turn.
That’s the power of design.
At Next Brand, we work with ambitious businesses across the globe to design brands that perform, commercially, culturally, and strategically. Whether you’re launching, scaling, or shifting into your next phase of growth, we bring the clarity and creative firepower to make it count.
If you’re serious about building a brand that earns its keep, we should talk. Contact Lee on +61 424 253 716 or lee@nextbrand.com.au
Read more from Lee Selsick
Lee Selsick, Director of Strategy & Design
Lee Selsick is a renowned expert in brand strategy and design-driven business growth. He is the founder of Next Brand, a Melbourne-based design consultancy, and a thought leader in leveraging design as a critical driver of profit and sustainability. With over two decades of experience, Lee helps ambitious brands unlock their potential through innovative strategies and creative solutions.
