"Chasing trends gets you nowhere”: the secret to standout branding with BUCK’s Ben Langsfeld

Details signal genuine care and concern for the people experiencing your work. Details are how brands build worlds that feel authentic and worth exploring.

Design is how brands demonstrate they understand, listen, and provide real value to their customers. The details in design create the texture that makes experiences feel real rather than manufactured. Like any well-crafted product—furniture, magazine, website—it's the small things that transform functional interactions into moments of genuine connection and wonder.

Airbnb is a perfect example. Their app creates almost no friction between browsing and booking—every interaction feels effortless. When you see those same familiar visual signals across their billboards and commercials, there's an immediate sense of trust and belonging that makes you identify with the brand and its values.

Compare that to booking a typical hotel: multiple websites—their own and third-party booking sites, multiple rates, different room categories, add-ons, member or exclusive discounts or perks. It gets confusing fast. Airbnb's attention to detail removes that cognitive load entirely.

BUCK’s recent work for Airbnb, launching Airbnb Experiences, is an example of something we're seeing as essential to effective brand building: the ability to create a world full of wonder that positions your brand as a portal to experiences people genuinely crave.

For this campaign, we created an animated sequence featuring ramen-making with an award-winning chef. The research revealed that people don't just want access to activities, they want to discover worlds that exist beyond the usual paths. The ramen scene works because it represents authentic craftsmanship and cultural engagement in a way that feels both aspirational and achievable.

The animation style lets us build an enchanting world rather than just show a service. We're positioning Airbnb not as another booking platform, but as a gateway to local mastery and hands-on cultural experiences. It's the difference between selling transactions and selling transformation.

Hah! I love that shot too. We discovered that people are hungry for access to authentic craftsmanship and local expertise. The ramen scene works because it represents something universal: the desire to go beyond surface-level tourism and engage with real skill and tradition. The key insight was positioning these experiences as portals to wonder.

Chasing trends gets you nowhere. You can draw inspiration from emerging visual languages, but original thinking and distinct choices are required for design to feel unique and create genuine differentiation.

The problem is everyone's looking in the same places for answers—studying the same competitors, analysing the same industry patterns. We've developed a systematic cross-domain research approach: Cultural, Psychological, Behavioural, adjacent industries. The breakthrough insights come from intersections where no one else is looking.

I advise my teams and partners to look for universal truths with real roots within the brand itself; legacy, history, nostalgia, craftsmanship details that create insights and build authentic architecture. Then we use cross-domain thinking to unlock fresh perspectives on those truths. Netflix didn't study television—they applied gaming psychology to entertainment. Uber didn't improve taxis—they created a new model borrowed from luxury hospitality.

The goal is creating worlds that feel distinctive and worth exploring, places people want to discover rather than just recognise.

Absolutely. Look at Apple's iOS dominance—there's incredible detail and quality in every pixel, creating loyal customers who can't imagine switching. But the bigger pattern is how details create worlds worth inhabiting.

Details don't just bring comfort—they build the texture that makes experiences feel authentic and worth exploring. They're signals that there's genuine care and deeper meaning behind what you're encountering.

It's like discovering a carefully curated space—when you notice thoughtful touches, you sense there's a whole world of intention behind them. That's design's role: creating portals to wonder that people want to step through, not just functional interactions they need to complete.

Good design makes life better by making better choices feel obvious. The best designers spot patterns in human behaviour that make complex things feel effortless—how people actually move through spaces, what creates trust, where friction lives.

In a world of infinite possibilities, the real skill is knowing which details matter and which don't. Great design eliminates the cognitive load of bad decisions. It guides you toward what you actually want without you having to think about it.

My biggest design pet peeve? ChatGPT killing the em dash. It turns every beautiful—carefully considered—thoughtfully placed—em dash into boring parentheses or commas. The em dash has rhythm—pause—emphasis—it's a typographic tool with real personality that gets steamrolled by algorithmic efficiency. RIP my beloved em dash.

The most telling thing about BUCK receiving B Corp certification? When we asked who wanted to create a version of our B Corp logo, the response was overwhelming (completely voluntary, completely authentic).

As we've grown, we've developed multiple business models. We operate simultaneously as a super-premium production company, a brand and design studio, and a product visioning consultancy.

But the bigger evolution is positioning ourselves between strategy and craft—the only two things that really matter anymore. We're focused on helping our partners build creative confidence and judgment in the AI era.

Instead of just making great work, we're becoming the team that helps you see opportunities before your competitors do. We've become experts at spotting patterns across completely different industries. What's working in gaming that could transform healthcare? What luxury brands understand about desire that B2B companies are missing?