Wonderfuel Issue Number 18 – The joy of feeling a bit better

We begin and end each day as humans. Yet somewhere between the noise, the pace and the pressure to keep up, we end up feeling a bit less like one.

The world is a lot right now. It has been for a while. And underneath the to-do lists and the relentless forward motion, there’s something most people never say out loud.

We’d all just like to feel a bit better.

Not transformed. Not optimised. Just a little more alive. A little more connected to something that matters. A little more like ourselves.

Think about why you really try anything new. A class you’ve been putting off. A trip you keep almost booking. A conversation you nearly didn’t start. It’s never purely logical. It’s because somewhere, quietly, you believe it might make you feel something. Something good.

Something real.

That instinct is worth listening to.

Because the things that end up meaning the most  to us, the experiences, the places, the people, they rarely arrived with a guarantee. They arrived because someone decided to reach toward feeling better rather than stay safely numb.

Joy isn’t a destination. It’s what happens when you stop waiting for the right moment and start moving toward the things that make you feel more human.‍

That’s worth exploring. Every single day.

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// Quote of the week //

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// The founder diary //

It's July 2025. I'm in stunning, sunny Gothenburg, attending the Gothia Youth World Football Cup that my stepson is playing in.

Picture the scene. Me, running through a riverside park looking like my head has been stung by a bee, desperately angling for any scrap of mobile signal to talk to a rather large prospective new client.

The 24-minute call dropped eight times in total. But I got it done. I had just secured a spot on the pitch list to rebrand one of the UK's largest pension organisations.

An intro through a friend of a friend of a friend, still with me? I was lucky enough to have that precious 'in', and I was able to start the priceless process of building chemistry with the client before the project even began, helping them shape the brief from the inside.

Then came six weeks of procurement and due diligence. Me, daily, thinking: it's only a matter of time before they realise what I've been telling them — that I'm a one-man band.

Then, 2nd November. The email arrives. We would love to work with you and Wonderment on this project. (I did mention it's just me, right?). And also: "It's okay if we see concepts before the end of November, isn't it?"

The biggest project in Wonderment's history. One of the biggest of my 30-year career. Concepts needed in three weeks. Two thoughts. One: tell them again, there is only one of me. Two: just start.

I chose the latter. And three weeks later I walked into their three-storey offices in Mayfair to present the work.

A unanimous vote for concept six. Yes, six concepts. On my own. In three weeks. Those weeks were kindly sponsored by Nespresso.

Fast forward to last Thursday, when the brand went live.

Almost seven months rebranding one of the UK's largest pension providers. Solo — with brilliant support from Smart Pension's own internal team. Proof that the biggest projects don't need the biggest teams.

They need the right ones.

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// The joyful brand – Tropicana //

There is an orange.

It has a straw in it. That’s it. That’s the whole idea.

And yet, when Tropicana decided to replace that image, the most joyful piece of packaging in the entire chilled juice aisle, with a plain glass of orange juice, something remarkable happened. People noticed. Not in a small way. Sales dropped twenty per cent in the first month.

Twenty million dollars, gone. In thirty days. They’d spent thirty-five million on the rebrand. They reversed it within weeks.

Here’s what that tells you. People couldn’t always explain why the new packaging felt wrong. They just knew it did. The joy had been removed and replaced with something clean, modern and entirely forgettable. A glass of orange juice instead of an orange with a straw, as if to say, this is what’s inside. Which is exactly the problem. Nobody needs to be told what’s in an orange juice carton.

What they needed was to feel something when they picked it up.

That straw in the orange isn’t information. It’s pure, distilled, completely unreasonable joy.

It’s a tiny visual joke. Who puts a straw in an orange? that makes you smile before you’ve even opened the fridge. It says summer. It says sunshine. It says this, right here, is going to be good.

Tropicana learned the hard way what the best brands understand instinctively. Joy isn’t decoration. It isn’t something you bolt on once the serious work is done. It’s the thing people come back for.

Take away the straw and you’ve got orange juice. Keep it and you’ve got Tropicana.

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// From the archives – Aston Martin Lagonda //

“Do you design annual reports?”

“No.”

“Great. You’ll be perfect for this.”

That’s how Aston Martin came to me. I was contracting at Black Sun Plc at the time, one of the world’s leading corporate communications agencies and the brief landed on my desk like a gift from the design gods.

The first annual report since the floating of Aston Martin Lagonda couldn’t look like a report. It needed to look like what it was selling, the most beautiful cars in the world. Bury that in columns, charts and regulatory language and you’ve got something nobody wants to touch.

So I didn’t make a report. I made a coffee table book that happened to contain the information a report is required to contain. A document you’d leave on a desk not out of obligation but out of pride. A piece that raised the bar for what luxury sector reporting could actually look like.

There’s a particular joy in being hired by someone who wants you precisely because you don’t know the rules. They’re not looking for the category answer. They’re looking for the person who hasn’t yet learned to be sensible about it.

I hadn’t. I wasn’t. And the result spoke for itself.

Not knowing the rules isn’t a disadvantage. It’s the brief.

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// Word of the week – Wondermental™ //

The world runs on fundamentals. The fundamentals of business. The fundamentals of design. The fundamentals of a good brief. We’re told to master them, stick to them, never stray too far from them. Fundamentals are safe. Fundamentals are sensible. Fundamentals won’t get you into trouble.

Fundamentals also won’t make anyone stop in their tracks.

Wondermental is what happens when someone decides that good enough isn’t good enough. When they go further than the brief asked. When joy gets designed in rather than hoped for.

Wondermental is the vibe when something is more than good, it’s delightfully, purposefully, jaw-droppingly magical. A design can be wondermental. A brand experience can be wondermental. Even your morning coffee can be wondermental, if it sparks joy.

Fundamental gets the job done. Wondermental makes it worth doing.

The businesses and brands that leave a mark aren’t the ones who mastered the basics. They’re the ones who knew when to put the basics down and reach for something else entirely.

The fundamentals will always be there. The wondermental moment won’t wait.

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// Who or what is Wonderment? //

Other agencies have a process. We have a joyride.

Less clipboard. Less stage-gated delivery. Less sitting in a room watching someone talk through a slide deck about their methodology.

More open road. More moments where you look out the window and think, I didn't know we were going here. This is brilliant.

Joy isn't a deliverable at Wonderment . It's the vehicle. And we've never once arrived somewhere that a process would have found.

Wonderment. The joyful branding agency that takes you on a joyride.

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

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