This wasn’t my first F&M rodeo, I have been twice before, once in the early 2000’s when I worked in London as a mid-20’s designer and again in 2011 when I took my son back to the capital he was conceived in. An overshare?
Coming back to 2026, as a tourist this time felt different. More nostalgic, more impressive, and definitely more affordable 25 years later!
Entering the store with my dear friend and who’s also a branding industry veteran, our original intent was focused on reviewing the packaging design, buying a few boxes of biscuits to enjoy after dinner and maybe few gifts for taking home to family. What I walked away with was 186 photos on my iPhone, inspiration for this written piece and a three-hundred-year argument for why whimsy and delight, done properly, is an under-leveraged business model. I felt re-inspired about the role my professional plays in shaping positive human experiences. Also, my wallet was $674 AUD poorer.
For context. Fortnum's started in 1707 with a footman reselling the Queen's leftover candles. That's the whole origin story, an opportunistic man who in today’s age would be badged an “entrepreneurial genius” with thousands of social media followers and a You Tube “behind the scenes” channel capturing his creative process. But in the day, it was unglamorous, and very British for the time. But what is remarkable about this department store is not how the proposition began, rather how it has endured. Every generation since has taken that scrappy foundation and turned it into an infrastructure and institutional enterprise system. The four-tonne clock above the entrance has been bowing two mechanical founders to each other, on the hour, since 1964. Nobody explains it to you. You just stand on the pavement with strangers and watch. The shop-front window displays equally a marvel (lots of photos of those) with each glassed pane framing a different experience to be explored. In a society that feels allot like a hustle train, this store demands you to slow down, sip and savour. I’m not going to lie, that feeling was long overdue for me and it was bloody delightful.
That's the subtlety some brands miss. They treat whimsy as an aesthetic filter — something applied in the tone of voice deck, but not an enduring part of its visual and environmental identity that influences all touch points from the language of the doorman to the tissue paper in the gift bags. Fortnum's did the opposite. It built its whole commercial model on the idea that pleasure is the product.
The basket hamper distilled into something you can hand to another person, a beautiful artifact that celebrates the experience and can express a myriad of human emotions, “thank you”, “I love you”, “I appreciate you” “I didn’t forget you”, “wish you were here”. Three centuries of provenance, decanted into a basket. Every touchpoint after that is designed to protect the moment of opening it. This is a company that understood unboxing as commerce a hundred years before the term existed — the Tiffany of food, if Tiffany sold marmalade instead of diamonds. The ribbon, the tin, the weight of the box in your hands — all of it is doing the same job a blue box does. It reminds you how to slow down, makes the moment feel special, like you are worth it.
A smart retail model for tourists like me, spend over £40 and Fortnum's will ship anywhere in the world. I know, because I did it. I sent a piece of that shop home to Australia for the price of a nice bottle of wine and it felt like a bargain in the moment because I wasn’t going to carry it around the rest of my trip, especially during an untimely heat wave. The pricing strategy meant I spent 4 times more than I would have and the experience felt personal, special and effortless. Most heritage brands protect scarcity by making themselves harder to access. Fortnum's protects its heritage and still lets you take it home, wherever home is. The whimsy travels.
And here's the part that brand leaders can get wrong when they try to protect a legacy like this: they centralise it. Hold on too tight. Fortnum's didn't. Creative agency Otherway has led the brand transformation for over a decade, introducing “We Make Joy” as the strategic spine and building the typography and identity system that now holds everything together. Design Bridge and Partners took the confectionery and biscuit ranges into new territory — The Biscuitorium, built around the clock motif, is their most recent proof of how far a single owned asset can stretch. Pearlfisher and Williams Murray Hamm rebuilt over 150 SKUs of packaging in eighteen months, working alongside each other rather than in competition. Decide rebuilt the entire tea range using neuroscience research from Durham University to choose a colour — Eau de Nil— something that could be owned outright. Richard Reeves took a single Robert Adam motif and extended it into a whole family of Neoclassical animal icons, each one specific enough that nobody else could claim it. Beautifully executed design strategy.
Five agencies across different decades, different briefs, no single hand on all of it but it feels seamless and beautifully integrated. The brand still reads as one voice, because the system seems not to be about controlling every output — that takes confidence. This is what branding is, all the ways a brand’s reputation can, and should, influence a customer's experience to build a valuable brand image with equity that’s as much evident in a P&L as it is in the hearts and minds of visitors. It’s not internally focused, it cares about the customer and outside universe.
Interior design across four levels, each with its own distinct feel
Curated micro-worlds within the store — the Biscuitorium as its own immersive category experience
Product design and packaging treated as a design discipline in craft and storytelling
Staff uniforms pressed to the point of looking architectural, nothing left to chance and service that feels personal
A full gift wrapping suite. Bags, tissue paper, ribbons, boxes in every shape and size
An inner stair-case with rich furnishings and aged timber that feels like an experience in itself
On-the-spot personalisation and engraving of merchandise
A fresh food market and cellar staffed with genuine product expertise, not just sales assistance. Tastings of products offered up on silver trays
Nothing in that building was doing one job. The packaging was doing brand work. The staff were doing brand work. ribbon was doing brand work. Not a single whimsical brand lever bit more all of them.
I've written before about Range Rover borrowing luxury fashion's codes and ending up sounding like every other premium brand reaching for the same wardrobe. Fortnum and Mason is the opposite case study, and it's a more useful one. Every whimsical touch — the clock, the motifs, the hamper, the address, even the pricing is drawn from something only they own. Nothing borrowed, nothing generic, nothing that could be swapped into a competitor's deck without anyone noticing. It feels, as an outsider, as a retail experience that adds to the cultural experience of London without the cliche of antiquated British codes.
The brands still getting it right are the ones with their own mechanical footman, with the discipline to spend three hundred years building the case for it without changing the essence of what they stand for.
And best bit was, I still had the unboxing experience to look forward to 10 weeks later when I arrived back home. Superb.
