Wonderfuel Issue Number 13 – The joy of a happy mistake

Some of the greatest things that ever existed were mistakes. Penicillin. Post-it notes. Chocolate chip cookies. The happy accident isn’t a failure wearing a disguise, it’s the universe quietly deciding your plan wasn’t quite good enough and nudging you towards something better.

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to get things right. The perfect plan. The perfect pitch. The perfect sentence. But the best bits of life rarely knock on the front door with a bow on. They sneak through a crack you didn’t know was there.

That burnt toast that became a new recipe. The wrong turn that found your favourite café. The typo that accidentally became your brand name. The spilled paint that made the painting. The detour that quietly turned out to be the destination.

Joy lives in the unplanned. Not in chaos, not in failure, but in the sweet spot between the two, where something goes sideways in exactly the right direction. The happy accident isn’t random luck. It’s what happens when you’re present enough to notice it, brave enough not to throw it away, and curious enough to lean in instead of backtrack.

Next time something goes wrong, pause before you reach for the eraser.

It might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

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// Quote of the week //

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/ The founder diary //

I was the youngest of three.

Which sounds fine. Until you understand what it actually means.

It means the attention was always elsewhere. It means the table was already set by the time you arrived. It means you spent a very long time quietly noticing that no one was quite noticing you.

So I did what any sensible seven-year-old would do. I misbehaved.

Not badly. Not destructively. Just  loudly. Visibly. Memorably. I wanted to be seen and so I made myself impossible to miss. Teachers called it attention-seeking. My family called me Naughty Sean. And for a while, I believed them.

What nobody told me and what I only understand now, thirty-something years and one agency later, is that the very thing they were trying to correct was the thing that was going to build my entire life.

The showing off? That became presentation skills. The attention-seeking? That became brand building. The refusal to just sit quietly and fit in? That became Wonderment.

Every joyful brand I’ve ever built has been made by the kid who needed to be seen. Every workshop I’ve walked into, every identity I’ve created, every word of this newsletter, that’s Naughty Sean, still at it. Still making himself impossible to miss.

The difference now is this: I’m slowly, imperfectly, learning to do it for me.

Not for the teacher. Not for the room. Not for the approval that never quite fills the gap. Just for the pure joy of making something that matters. Of showing up fully. Of colouring loudly inside my own lines.

They tried to fix the naughty kid. Instead, they accidentally made a founder.

That’s the thing about happy accidents. You rarely recognise them at the time.

// The joyful brand – Oatly //

Ok So I have been putting off using this as the joyful brand for long enough now.

Oatly shouldn’t work. It’s oat milk. A beige liquid in a cardboard carton sitting quietly in the fridge section between the soya and the almond. No one makes that sound exciting. No one except Oatly.

Oatly is joyful not because it tries to be fun but because it absolutely refuses to be boring. The packaging doesn’t describe the product, it talks to you. “Wow no cow.” “It’s like milk, but made for humans.” It’s self-aware, a little daft and utterly disarming. It makes you smile in a supermarket aisle, which is approximately the last place anyone expects to smile.

But here’s what makes Oatly genuinely Wondermental, the joy isn’t just tonal. It runs all the way through. The advertising is joyful. The social media is joyful. Their sustainability reporting is joyful. Even their CEO made an intentionally terrible TV commercial, singing badly about oat milk and the internet loved them for it.

Oatly understands something most brands don’t: people don’t just want to drink something. They want to feel something while they do it. They want to be charmed. They want a brand that makes them feel in on the joke.

In a category that takes itself seriously, Oatly turned up in a rainbow jumper and started a proper joyvolution. Not through noise, but through nerve. The nerve to be weird on purpose. The nerve to be joyful in a space that had forgotten joy was even an option.

That’s not marketing. That’s joy, designed and delivered with precision.

// From the archives – Princess Grace Hospital Logo //

Eight hundred thousand new businesses are set up in the UK every year. How many of them have brands that are properly crafted? Genuinely, painstakingly, take-your-time crafted?

Not many. And that worries me.

A few years back, during my time as Creative Partner at Atticus, a dream brief landed on my desk. The Princess Grace Hospital, one of London’s most prestigious private hospitals, part of HCA Healthcare UK, needed their logo redrawn. Not redesigned. Redrawn. After twenty years, the Princess needed to be rebuilt properly. Clean, digital-ready, reversible out of colour, fit for a new era.

There was only one person for a job like this. John Geary. The legend behind the iconic Johnnie Walker striding man. A craftsman of the highest order, the kind of illustrator whose work stops you in your tracks, not because it shouts, but because every single line is exactly where it needs to be.

But John had passed away.

So my business partner turned to me and said it was time to hone my Illustrator skills and get bézier-curve-tastic on it.

Right then.

What followed was weeks of careful, iterative work. Rebuilding the Princess face by face, curve by curve. Finding the balance between likeness and logo. Between a portrait that felt human and a mark that worked technically, clean at small sizes, reversing cleanly out of the hospital’s deep corporate blue, worthy of the institution it represented.

The process wasn’t linear. It was four steps forward, two steps back, stare at it, walk away, come back fresh, see it differently. Every refinement a decision. Every decision an act of craft.

The final mark is poised, graceful, unmistakably regal. It works everywhere the original couldn’t. And it does what the best logos always do, it feels inevitable. Like it couldn’t be anything else.

Some jobs remind you why craft matters. Why you can’t rush a face. Why the shortcut is never really a shortcut at all.

Is brand crafting a dying art? I sure as hell hope not.

John, I hope I would have made you proud.

// Word of the week – Joyjitsu™ //

Most businesses compete the same way . Better features, lower prices, more noise and then wonder why everything starts to feel the same. Because it is. And when everything looks and sounds identical, the only thing left to compete on is price, which is a race nobody actually wins.

Here's the simple truth. People don't choose based on what makes the most sense. They choose based on what feels right, that quiet, instinctive moment where logic steps aside and something deeper takes over. "I don't know why, but this one just feels better." That's where the decision is made. That's where brands are won and lost.

At Wonderment I call it Joyjitsu™, using joy as leverage. Not to fight harder, but to move differently. While your competitors are optimising, you're creating real emotional lift. While they're trying to be better, you're becoming unforgettable. While they're leading with logic, you're leading with your affective advantage, the kind of edge that can't be reverse-engineered and doesn't show up in a competitor's briefing document.

// Who or what is Wonderment? //

Wonderment is the joyful branding agency. We make businesses more effective by making their branding more affective. Wonderment isn’t just a name. It’s something wonderful, done on purpose. Something meant.

Got something exciting brewing, drop me and email let’s chat.

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