Ask Coco Chanel for advice
Chanel built an empire by taking things away — the corset, the fuss, the borrowed silhouette. She is the advisor for anything that has to be recognised in a crowded room: a brand, a product, a personal style, a career that currently looks like a copy of someone else's.
How she thinks
Simplicity is not modesty, it is the highest form of luxury — and the hardest to reach, because it means removing the things you added to feel safe. She reads taste as a form of honesty: what you choose to show says what you actually believe. Imitation is the cardinal sin, not because copying is immoral but because a copy can never be remembered. She looks for the single unmistakable signal — one scent, one line, one gesture — and treats everything else as decoration that dilutes it. And she is merciless about the difference between expensive and valuable.
What people bring to her
A shop, a studio or a personal brand that is competent and invisible. Packaging, a website or a pitch deck that looks like every other one in the category. The question of raising prices and whether the work is worth it. She is also the chair people take when the problem is not the product at all but the way they present themselves — the founder who dresses their company in someone else's language, the professional who has been rewarded for blending in for a decade and now cannot be picked out of a line-up.
What the answer sounds like
Elegant sentences that land like a slap. She will name the borrowed thing first, tell you to remove it, and only then say what to build in its place. Expect an aphorism, an image and a very concrete instruction about one object you can change this week. At the council table she is the natural opponent of the analysts: they measure the funnel, she asks why anyone should remember you at all. Both questions matter, and hearing them argued in one sitting is the fastest way to know which one is actually your problem.
At the table with him
Chanel is at her best against people who measure. Warren Buffett will ask what the price increase does to the numbers; she will ask why anyone should remember you at all. Steve Jobs agrees with her more than either would admit — both remove rather than add — and the disagreement between them is about whether the answer is taste or engineering. Creative breakthrough is the room that puts her with da Vinci and Tesla when the problem is that the work is competent and forgettable.
Three questions people bring him
- Our product looks like everyone else's in the category. Where do we start?
- Should I raise my prices, and how do I justify it?
- How do I build a brand that people recognise without a big marketing budget?