Should founders build their brand around their personal taste?

The answer is no.

A founder's point of view & taste are two different things.

Your POV is how you see the world, what you think the category gets wrong.

Your taste is that you like earth tones, or you're loyal to some serif, or you think everything looks better in dark mode.

You can build a brand on the first one because it's your ownable worldview that nobody else can claim. The second is just an aesthetic preference, and preferences make a lousy foundation because anyone can have the same one.

I wrote a while back that if someone can copy your visual identity and it works just as well as yours, the visuals were never the thing doing the work. Same idea here, pointed the other direction.

Taste is easy to copy. Anyone can lift your palette and your type. It happens all the time and people come to X to complain about it.

But nobody can lift your unique perspective based on personal experience. They call it founder/market fit for a reason.

So when you anchor a brand to your taste (over your POV), you're anchoring it to the part that was always the most copyable.

Look at Glonuts. The founder wears cool designer clothes while the brand isn't sleek or serious at all. He believes better-for-you food shouldn't take itself so seriously, and you feel that in the name, the colors, the copy, all of it. It could've been beige and minimal and “premium” if he'd just decorated it with his own taste. Instead it's playful, because it reflects his philosophy for doing business.

So make your brand exude your ethos, not your taste.

The best brands are impossible to knock off, not because of how they look, but because they embody what their founders believe.