Ahran Won

I work on the problem of what happens when a brand stops being a logo and has to become a room — a store, a pop-up, a shelf a customer reaches toward.

That came out of training. I studied architecture at SAIC and landscape architecture at the Harvard GSD, and spent my first years in practice on landscape and architecture projects in the United States. When I moved into brand work I kept the discipline: schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding, on-site supervision. It is an unusual vocabulary for a brand director, and it is the reason my work gets built the way it was drawn.

Since then I have created a brand from nothing, rebuilt an established one, run retail design across Asia-Pacific for Disney, led a three-team creative division through more than twenty-five venue builds, and directed creative marketing at Baskin-Robbins Korea. The scale changes. The question does not.