Taste is not static. Brands evolve, leadership changes, acquisitions happen, and cultural relevance shifts. A score today is a snapshot, not a verdict. Score History tracks how brand taste changes over time, re-evaluating quarterly to capture the arc of a brand's relationship with taste.
Some brands hold steady. Some decline. A rare few improve. The trajectory tells a story that a single score never could.
Supreme's taste trajectory is a case study in what happens when independence meets corporate ownership. In early 2024, Supreme still carried the cultural cachet of a brand that had invented modern scarcity marketing. The box logo was a Rorschach test for taste.
The VF Corp acquisition changed the equation. Distribution expanded but the cultural awareness that made Supreme Supreme began to dilute. More stores, more stock, more accessibility — each one eroding the scarcity that was the brand's entire taste proposition. The score dropped 10 points in eighteen months. You can buy a brand but you cannot buy the taste that built it.
Tesla's taste score tells the story of product excellence undermined by brand behaviour. The engineering remains impressive. The Model S interior, the Supercharger network, the software-first approach — these are genuine taste decisions.
But taste is holistic. The CEO's social media presence has become the brand's loudest touchpoint, and it scores catastrophically low on Cultural Awareness and Restraint. The Cybertruck divided opinion in a way that hurt more than it helped. Each quarter, the gap between product taste and brand taste widens. A brand is everything a company does in public.
Apple is the benchmark for consistency in taste. The score has barely moved in two years because the brand's commitment to Craft remains unwavering. The M-series chips, the Vision Pro launch, the continued refinement of the ecosystem — each shows a brand that still cares deeply about how things are made.
The slight upward trajectory comes from improved Cultural Awareness — the Shot on iPhone campaign evolved, the Apple TV+ content improved. Restraint, paradoxically, has slipped slightly as the product line expanded, but Craft improvements offset it. When you maintain taste at scale, the score holds.
Aesop is the rarest trajectory in the index: a brand that gets more tasteful over time. The L'Oreal acquisition in 2023 could have been a Supreme-style decline story. Instead, the brand doubled down on what made it exceptional.
New stores continued the brand's tradition of architectural collaboration. Product development stayed restrained — no celebrity collabs, no TikTok-bait limited editions. Restraint and Timelessness both ticked upward. Aesop proved that an acquisition doesn't have to kill taste if the acquirer has the wisdom to leave it alone.
Nike's trajectory is the story of taste eroding through overextension. The Swoosh is still the most tasteful logo ever designed. 'Just Do It' still resonates precisely because of its restraint. But the brand around these iconic assets has lost discipline.
Too many SKUs. Too many collabs. The DTC pivot disrupted wholesale relationships without building sufficient direct connection. The Restraint score tells the story — dropping from 15 to 13 as the product line expanded. Nike's Cultural Awareness remains high — the brand still reads the room — but taste requires editing, and Nike stopped editing.
Every quarter, every brand in the index will be re-evaluated. Cultural shifts, leadership changes, product launches, and public behaviour will all be factored in. The score is a conversation that never ends.
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