The Unexpected Way Leading Brands Are Building Real Community: Ancient Rituals

Written By Rachel Taylor

There's a moment when you walk into an Aesop store that feels less like retail and more like entering a monastery. The stone basins, the apothecary bottles, the scent of vetiver and cedar. It's designed to slow you down, to make you pause. It's deliberate and it's working.

Something is shifting in how consumers are relating to brands, and the smartest companies are noticing. From beauty to fashion to publishing, there's a quiet movement toward ancient rhythms, seasonal rituals, and practices that connect us to something older than ourselves.

Ffern sends fragrances tied to the equinoxes and solstices. Reformation weaves lunar cycles into their content strategy. Patagonia has built an entire program around the ritual of repair and renewal with Worn Wear, elevating mending to something almost ceremonial. Books like Wintering by Katherine May have become cultural touchstones, not because they're about survival, but because they're about reconnecting with natural rhythms we've lost.

This isn't just aesthetic nostalgia. It's a strategic response to a profound shift in what consumers are actually craving.

But let's be clear: this approach isn't for every brand. If you're selling convenience, speed, or pure utility, you're playing a different game. Ritual-led branding works when the experience of using your product is part of its value, when people choose you for how you make them feel, not just what you do. Know which game you're in.

Why This Is Happening Now

Two forces are colliding to make this moment ripe for ritual-led branding.

First, we lost our temporal anchors during COVID. Without commutes, without Friday nights out, without the rhythm of the working week, time became shapeless. Anthropologist Bradd Shore, who spent a decade studying middle-class American families, found that "ritual is one of the most important ways we mark time and give our lives a predictable shape and pulse." We're only a few years past that collective disorientation, and people are still hungry for structure, for markers in the year that help them feel grounded and whole. We need rituals to make sense of time again.

Second, as we've built increasingly sophisticated digital worlds, we've inadvertently highlighted what humans crave most: physical presence, embodied experience, and real belonging. The more digital our lives become, the more we seek out the analogue, the tangible, the ancient. If we can't find belonging in our physical spaces, we'll create it through the brands and products we choose, and then recreate that sense of connection through the ritual of using them.

Anthropologist Victor Turner called this "communitas," a profound sense of belonging and identity that emerges through shared ritual experience. The brands succeeding now understand this instinctively. They're not just selling products. They're creating the conditions for communitas.

The Strategic Opportunity for Marketers

Here's what matters: this isn't about slapping a full moon emoji on your Instagram grid or adding sage to your product line. The brands doing this well understand something deeper about human psychology. They're building entire worlds for people to belong to.

In my years working across luxury and premium brands, I've seen firsthand how the most resonant marketing doesn't just sell a product; it creates a system of meaning. When we curated collaborations with master craftspeople and timed activations to major seasonal moments, we weren't just creating content. We were building anticipation and continuity into the brand itself.

Look at what Ffern has built: beautiful packaging that arrives like a gift, a waiting list that creates scarcity and community, photography that feels like a meditation on nature and time. Every touchpoint reinforces the ritual. You're not just buying fragrance; you're marking the turning of the seasons. In just a few years, they've surpassed 1 million Instagram followers and maintain waiting lists for their products - proof that when you build genuine community around ritual, people don't just buy, they belong.

Aesop doesn't just sell skincare. Their stores feel like sanctuaries, their scents recall forests and stone, their entire brand architecture invites you into a slower, more intentional way of moving through the world.

Compare that to brands that are dabbling in astrology content or seasonal themes without substance. The difference is coherence. The brands succeeding are the ones creating an immersive brand world where ritual isn't a campaign. It's the infrastructure.

What This Means for How We Build Brands

If you're building or scaling a brand right now, this is the moment to think harder about the deeper human psyche. Ask yourself:

Are you creating a destination, or just a transaction? Consumers don't just want to buy from you; they want to belong to something. Your brand should feel like a world they can step into, not a billboard they scroll past.

Are you designing for the full sensory experience? Ritual is embodied. It's not just what your emails say. It's the weight of your packaging, the scent of your product, the way your physical or digital spaces make people feel when they enter them.

Are you building continuity into your calendar? Seasonal drops, equinox releases, monthly rituals. These aren't just marketing tactics. They give your audience something to anticipate, to return to, to weave into the rhythm of their own lives.

Are you honouring what you're borrowing? This is where the line between authentic and exploitative becomes crucial. If you're invoking ancient practices or cultural rituals, do it with integrity. Partner with practitioners, pay artisans fairly, understand the context. People can sense when something is performed versus lived.

Putting This Into Practice: A Ritual Brand Audit

If you're ready to explore what this looks like for your brand, start here:

1. Map Your Calendar Against Natural Time

Pull up your content calendar and marketing plan for the next 12 months. Now lay it against the natural calendar: equinoxes, solstices, full moons, harvest seasons, darker months.

Ask:

  • Are we only marking commercial moments (Black Friday, Valentine's Day) or are we creating space for natural rhythms?

  • Where could we build anticipation around seasonal shifts rather than arbitrary product drops?

  • What would a winter campaign look like if it actually honoured what winter means - rest, reflection, turning inward?

2. Audit Your Sensory Touchpoints

List every place a customer interacts with your brand. Then ask: what does it feel like?

  • Packaging: Weight, texture, scent, opening experience. Does it feel precious or disposable?

  • Digital spaces: What's the pace? Does your website make people scroll faster or slow down?

  • Physical spaces (if applicable): Sound, lighting, materials, how the space makes bodies move.

  • Written voice: Reading your emails, does someone feel rushed or held?

Ritual is embodied. If everything is optimised for speed and conversion, you're not creating the conditions for ritual.

3. Identify What Your Customers Already Ritualise

You don't need to invent ritual from scratch - your customers are already creating it. Look for:

  • Comments about "my Sunday morning ritual" or "I always use this when..."

  • Product photos that show care in display or storage

  • Repeat purchase patterns (monthly? seasonal?)

  • How long people spend with your content vs just consuming and moving on

Then ask: how can we support and elevate what's already happening rather than imposing something artificial?

4. Test for Coherence

Look at your brand across all touchpoints and ask:

  • Could someone describe our "world" to a friend, or are we just a collection of campaigns?

  • If you removed our logo, would our aesthetic/voice/approach still be recognisable?

  • Do our partnerships and collaborations reinforce the world we're building, or are they just opportunistic?

  • Most importantly: would someone feel proud to say they're part of this, or just that they buy from us?

The difference between ritual-led branding and trend-hopping is coherence. Every element should reinforce the same deeper truth about what you're inviting people into.

The Deeper Truth

We're in an era where people are craving meaning, not just content. They want to feel connected: to nature, to craft, to each other, to something larger than the algorithm. Brands that understand this and build for it won't just win market share. They'll become part of how people make sense of their lives.

The opportunity isn't to co-opt ritual. It's to create the conditions for it, to build brands that give people permission to slow down, to mark time, to feel like they belong.

People are missing something fundamental, and they know it. The brands that meet that need with integrity and substance won't just build communities - they'll build the kind of loyalty that translates to lasting commercial success. That's the opportunity.

References & Further Reading

Direct Citations

Shore, B. (2003). Family Time: The Social Organization of Care. Harvard University Press.

Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing.

Books Referenced

May, K. (2020). Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Rider.

Brand Case Studies

Aesop - aesop.com
Retail design philosophy and sensory brand architecture

Ffern - ffern.co
Natural perfumery tied to seasonal cycles

Patagonia Worn Wear - wornwear.patagonia.com
Repair and renewal program

Reformation - thereformation.com
Lunar cycle content strategy and sustainability focus

Further Reading on Ritual & Consumer Behavior

Driver, T. F. (1991). The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Our Communities. HarperCollins.

Rook, D. W. (1985). "The Ritual Dimension of Consumer Behavior." Journal of Consumer Research, 12(3), 251-264.

Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge University Press.

Schechner, R. (2013). Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd ed.). Routledge.

McCracken, G. (2005). Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management. Indiana University Press.

On Temporal Disruption & Post-COVID Consumer Psychology

Bastian, B., et al. (2021). "The rhythm of daily life during COVID-19: Examining changes in routines and well-being." Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Holt, D. (2021). "The Pandemic Has Created a New Kind of Consumer." Harvard Business Review.

Rachel Taylor