I think about brands the way I think about buildings, and I am aware of how that sounds. But the parallel is not a metaphor I reach for to sound clever — it is the actual operating model. A brand, like a property, is something you acquire or create on a thesis, invest in consistently, and hold long enough for the compounding to show up. Most people fail at brand building for the same reason most people fail at real estate: they treat a holding-period asset like a trading vehicle.
Taste is underwriting
When I underwrite a building, the first questions are about what is actually there versus what someone claims is there. Brand decisions work the same way. The first question is not "will this campaign pop" — it is "is this true, and does it fit the thing we are building." Taste, in a business context, is just the discipline of saying no to things that would work briefly and cost you later.
With Detour, every packaging choice, every product name, every piece of the visual world goes through that filter. In a category where so much of the market looks interchangeable — I wrote about this in Packaging is the Product Decision — the refusal to blend in is itself an underwriting decision. You are choosing a basis: this is what the brand is, this is what it will never do, and everything gets judged against it.
Consistency is maintenance
Nobody posts photos of the roof they replaced on schedule, but that roof is why the building is still worth something. Brand consistency is the same kind of invisible maintenance. Showing up with the same standard of quality, the same voice, the same level of care, week after week, in places nobody writes articles about — that is the work, and it is mostly boring.
The temptation is always to chase novelty, because novelty produces a visible spike and consistency produces nothing you can screenshot. But consistency is what accumulates. A customer who had a good experience and then had the same good experience six months later is worth more than ten people who saw a clever ad once. In cannabis especially, where trust is scarce and the shelf is crowded, reliability is a differentiator that cannot be copied quickly.
Reputation is the asset that compounds
Real estate taught me that compounding beats hype, and I wrote a whole piece on what property taught me about building companies. The brand version is this: reputation is the only brand asset that appreciates, and it appreciates slowly. Every unit that ships correctly, every retailer who gets what they were promised, every customer who was not disappointed — each one is a small deposit. The balance is invisible for a long time, and then one day it is the most valuable thing the company owns.
Hype runs the account in the other direction. It spends accumulated attention on a spike and leaves you roughly where you started, minus the budget. There are brands in every category that are famous for a season and gone in three years, and the autopsy is always the same: withdrawals exceeded deposits.
The holding period changes the decisions
The most useful thing about treating a brand as a holding-period asset is what it does to your decision-making. When you assume you will own the brand in ten years, whole categories of tempting moves disqualify themselves. The shortcut that damages trust. The partnership that pays well but confuses what you stand for. The cost cut that customers will feel before you do. You stop asking "does this work this quarter" and start asking "does this make the position stronger," and those two questions have different answers surprisingly often.
I am Travis Hermiz. I build in Michigan, in property and in brands, with the same posture: buy or build on a clear thesis, maintain it honestly, and hold it long enough for the compounding to be visible. The about page has the background, and the rest of the blog is me working through this thinking in public.