10/03/2026
𝗪𝗲 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹.
The product.
The service.
The offer.
The course, the book, the app, the gadget.
But every now and then you come across someone who makes you realise… it was never really about the thing at all.
Take William Lever.
If you looked at the product alone, it wouldn’t have seemed particularly exciting.
Soap.
Not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to build an empire around.
In the late 1800s, soap was mostly sold in dull, anonymous slabs. A shopkeeper would cut off a chunk, wrap it in paper, and hand it across the counter.
Functional.
Forgettable.
Interchangeable.
But Lever noticed something most people didn’t.
The problem wasn’t the soap.
The problem was everything around it.
People didn’t know what they were buying. Quality varied wildly. Hygiene was improving across Britain, but the products people relied on were inconsistent and unremarkable.
So Lever didn’t just sell soap.
He gave it a name.
Sunlight Soap.
Wrapped. Recognisable. Something people could ask for specifically.
That one decision quietly shifted the entire experience.
Because once something has a name, it can carry meaning.
Cleanliness.
Modern living.
Health.
The bar of soap hadn’t really changed.
But the story around it had.
And then Lever did something even more unusual.
He started thinking about the environment in which the soap was made.
Factories were growing across Britain, and working conditions were… let’s say, not exactly designed for human flourishing.
So Lever built a village.
Port Sunlight.
Homes.
Green spaces.
Schools.
Art galleries.
Now history looks at this in different ways. Some see it as enlightened. Others call it paternalistic.
But either way, it reveals something interesting about the way he thought.
He wasn’t just selling a product.
He was designing a system.
The brand.
The packaging.
The story.
The environment around the people who made it.
Which brings me back to that thought at the start.
We often think business is about the thing you sell.
But sometimes the real leverage comes from redesigning everything around it.
The context.
The trust.
The experience.
The meaning.
The thing itself might stay exactly the same.
Yet the world around it changes.
And that changes everything.
Speak soon,
John “redesigning everything” Cassidy-Rice