Skift Take
Lifestyle brands can feel like the forced product of one too many focus groups. Potato Head is the opposite: It's an Indonesian-born lifestyle brand that has been slowly built from the ground up with an emphasis on community, art, and culture.
We live in an era of lifestyle brands that lack a distinct point of view. Large chains obsessed with focus groups are digesting insights on a target — millennials or Gen Z — and spitting out new chains at a rapid pace. More often than not, this type of top-down, insights- and committee-focused approach doesn't work, and at worst, it can be cringeworthy.
It's refreshing, then, to witness a lifestyle brand emerging not from big-chain focus groups but from the singular vision of an Indonesian entrepreneur focused on culture and community. Potato Head, founded by Ronald Akili, began as a restaurant in Jakarta. It has since grown to include outposts in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bali. The Desa Potato Head property in Bali has a beach club, a boutique hotel consisting of suites called Katamama, the oceanfront Potato Head Studios, and the latest piece of the "creative village" complex, a larger hotel footprint launching in May designed by Rem Koolhaas' firm, OMA.
Key to Akili's approach is the notion of an actual community. In a place like Bali, where tourism is rampant and there can be little to no interaction with locals, intermingling is the opportunity. It's the opposite of what the Travel Almanac recently called Bali Syndrome when describing the ramifications of segregated tourism and the resulting implosion of culture. The root of this is the disconnect between hospitality developers and locals.
Potato Head, on the other hand, manages an incredible balancing act: Its properties are beautifully designed and glisten with a new twist on Balinese culture. They attract global tastemakers like DJ Peggy Gou, Louis Vuitton's Virgil Abloh, and DJ Harvey (who designed the ne
