Building an Indonesian Lifestyle Brand From the Ground Up
Photo Credit: Potato Head Beach Club in Bali. Desa Potato Head
Skift Take
Lifestyle brands can feel like the forced product of one too many focus groups. Potato Head is the opposite: It's an Indonesian-born lifestyle brand that has been slowly built from the ground up with an emphasis on community, art, and culture.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.
We live in an era of lifestyle brands that lack a distinct point of view. Large chains obsessed with focus groups are digesting insights on a target — millennials or Gen Z — and spitting out new chains at a rapid pace. More often than not, this type of top-down, insights- and committee-focused approach doesn't work, and at worst, it can be cringeworthy.
It's refreshing, then, to witness a lifestyle brand emerging not from big-chain focus groups but from the singular vision of an Indonesian entrepreneur focused on culture and community. Potato Head, founded by Ronald Akili, began as a restaurant in Jakarta. It has since grown to include outposts in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bali. The Desa Potato Head property in Bali has a beach club, a boutique hotel consisting of suites called Katamama, the oceanfront Potato Head Studios, and the latest piece of the "creative village" complex, a larger hotel footprint launching in May designed by Rem Koolhaas' firm, OMA.
Key to Akili's appro
