Paris, 8:15 am in an open space bathed in soft light, silhouettes move slowly between large abstract canvases hanging on the walls. Nothing here looks like conventional offices: no aggressive neon lights, no performance indicator panels. Instead, a smell of waxed wood, a piano in a corner, and a large oak table around which the first meetings of the day stand. The boss, a slightly crumpled shirt, speaks of “balance of forms” and “movement of projects” as if he mentioned a sculpture.
This place is not an artist workshop, but the headquarters of a French SME specializing in the design of connected objects. Its leader, Julien Marchand, assumes: “I do not run a company like a machine to produce. I see it as a living work. Each decision is a brushstroke.”
The idea is not completely new, but it remains rare and often misunderstood. Can we really direct a business with an aesthetic intention? Not to seduce customers with a nice packaging or a licked graphic charter, but to create beautiful in the deep sense, the one that encompasses meaning, coherence, truth.
Aesthetics, much more than a matter of style
Aesthetics, in its philosophical sense, is not limited to appearance. The beautiful is not only “pretty”. Aristotle, Kant or Hannah Arendt tried to define it as an experience that rises, which elevates the parties with the whole.
Applied to the company, this principle changes the perspective. Here, “making it beautiful” means giving shape to something that makes sense, aligning values, acts and results. It is not a varnish; It is an invisible architecture that connects strategic choices, internal organization and even the way employees speak to each other.
For the art historian and strategy consultant, Sophie Reynaud: “Beauty in business, it is when the structure, the processes and the mission meet. When a customer feels that there is a harmony between what the company promises, what it delivers, and the way it does it.”
When the strategy becomes composition
In this vision, the role of the leader is close to that of a composer or a conductor. Strategic decisions become movements of a broader symphony. Obsession is not only profitability, but harmony.
This can result in:
- Narrative consistency: each product, each marketing action, each partnership tells the same story.
- An economy of means: avoid the superfluous to strengthen the strength of the whole.
- Pay attention to transitions: how a customer goes from the website to the hotline, how an employee changes mission – as we treat a melted in the cinema.
Pioneers who dare the aesthetics
Some companies have already taken the plunge. We think of Aesop, the Australian brand of cosmetics, which designs each of its shops as a unique work, thought by a different architect, with a local anchoring. Or in Patagonia, whose aesthetic decisions include the refusal of rowdy campaigns to favor a communication that reflects their ecological commitment.
In France, the Hermès house has long embodied this search for a beautiful who does not get rid of. Pierre-Alexis Dumas, its artistic director, once declared: “Beauty is a requirement that goes beyond the useful. It is not only calculated in figures.”
But this aesthetic is not limited to creative or high -end sectors. Even a logistics, advice or engineering company can choose to grant its decisions around an idea of beauty: beauty of gesture, clarity of processes, elegance of solutions.
The risk of surface “beautiful”
Be careful however: in a world saturated with marketing, “doing it nice” can easily fire to artifice. An Instagrammable desk, a worked logo, a well -licked campaign – all this can hide an emptiness of meaning.
Julien Marchand recognizes this: “We can buy a design sofa and an Italian coffee machine, but if the employees speak badly or if the customers are deceived, it is false beautiful. The real beautiful, it feels in the invisible details.”
Beauty as an economic engine
What if this approach was not only philosophical, but also efficient? Several studies on the experience used and customer show that the coherence and the perceived quality improve loyalty, reduce the costs of turnover and attract talent.
In 2022, a report from the University of Stanford on design management revealed that companies adopting a coherent aesthetic vision (beyond branding) recorded 15 % faster than average, thanks to better customer satisfaction and greater internal innovation.
This is explained: an environment designed as a work makes you want to invest in it, to protect it, to make it evolve with care.
Aesthetic intention as a managerial compass
How, concretely, direct with aesthetic intention?
1/ Clarify vision as an artistic concept: Define a “red thread” which crosses all the activity, as a musical theme.
2/ Work the transitions and details: See interactions as micro-ages that make up the whole.
3/ Refuse the useless: Simplify, prune, look for the purity.
4/ Cultivate a right gesture culture: Encourage employees to treat not only the result, but also the way of doing things.
5/ Measure differently: Integrate qualitative indicators (harmony, satisfaction, perception) in the dashboards.
From profitability to resonance
The term “resonance”, dear to sociologist Hartmut Rosa, takes its place here. An “aesthetic” company does not only try to produce or sell; She seeks to create a resonance with her environment, to enter into dialogue with her stakeholders.
This changes the relationship to time: less race for quarterly results, more attention to the long trajectory. This also changes the relationship to errors: they are no longer only failures to be corrected, but roughness that can contribute to the authenticity of the work.
What if art was the next key skill of leaders?
In a world where algorithms already optimize efficiency and where AI knows how to produce standardized content, human advantage may well reside in this ability to create deep beautiful, the one that escapes simple logical rules.
Some incubators are starting to take an interest in it: training in Aesthetic Leadership emerging, mixing philosophy, visual arts and management. The idea is to prepare leaders capable of thinking about a business not as a system to optimize, but as a creation to embody.
Leaving Julien Marchand’s premises, we meet a collaborator who puts a prototype on a shelf. She smiles: “Here, we are not just a product. We try to do something that we will be proud of in twenty years.”
Maybe that’s it, basically, to direct with an aesthetic intention: to build something that does not get rid of, that keeps its strength even when the fashions pass, and which, one day, can be looked at as we look at a beautiful work-with emotion, respect, and a little admiring silence.
