Bremont, The Ordinary, and Finisterre on Brand Storytelling at Shoptalk Europe 2026

There is a version of brand storytelling that fills conference sessions and does very little: narrative frameworks, brand purpose pyramids, customer journey mapping. And then there is the version that puts a Felix the Cat watch on a London taxi, sells eggs from a skincare brand, and enables surfers to confront their government about sewage in the sea. At Shoptalk Europe 2026, a panel on brand storytelling: messaging that moves featured three brands at very different scales doing the second version of the thing.

Elly from Bremont, Amy B, VP Brand at Deciem/The Ordinary, and Bronwyn Foster Butler, CMO of Finisterre, each gave a specific, operational account of what brand storytelling actually looks like in practice. The session was moderated across two sessions but is best understood as a single conversation about the same underlying question: how do you build genuine emotional connection with consumers in a market where attention is fractured and authenticity is in short supply?

Bremont: challenger brand logic means the rules are different

Bremont is a 20-year-old luxury British watchmaker competing against brands with centuries of heritage. By that measure, the history simply does not exist. Elly’s response to this constraint was not to try to simulate heritage but to generate it: to find authentic stories within the brand’s verticals of land, sea, air, and space that carry genuine weight.

The examples she gave were not marketing constructs. Bremont has a partnership with Martin Baker, who manufacture ejection seats for fighter pilots: the watches go through those tests. In April, a new partnership was announced with Astro Lab, who have been awarded a NASA contract to build a lunar rover vehicle. A Bremont watch will be integrated into that rover and travel to the moon in the second half of 2026. “Someone being able to purchase the same watch that is on the moon, and look up at the moon knowing that watch is there: that is an amazing story,” she said.

The Felix the Cat collaboration with Universal illustrated what Bremont does with a story once it has found one. Felix already had genuine aviation heritage: he was used as the mascot of an American aviation squadron. The “Watch Your Six” campaign, built on the pilot phrase meaning watch your back, ran across online and offline channels, wrapped a taxi in London, engaged influencers and ambassadors, and drove sales in South Korea and Japan. It was not manufactured connection. It was the discovery and activation of a connection that already existed.

The underlying logic of Bremont’s approach is worth drawing out. Elly described the customer journey for a luxury watch as an 18-month romance cycle: the purchase takes time to arrive, so the storytelling has to sustain interest and build emotion across an extended period. Rather than targeting by age, Bremont targets by motivation: affinity for adventure, exploration, and aviation. The audience for a watch that goes to the moon is not defined by age. It is defined by what the customer cares about.

The Ordinary: pricing integrity is a brand value, not a marketing message

Amy B’s account of The Ordinary’s marketing philosophy started in the same place that the brand did: a frustration with the beauty industry’s relationship with pricing and transparency. The Ordinary was not built around a campaign. It was built around a belief. “Quality is not determined by price point.” That is the founding conviction, and every piece of marketing the brand produces has to be able to connect back to it.

The egg campaign is the most striking illustration of this. During a period in the US when avian flu was driving the price of eggs up dramatically, The Ordinary rented some fridges and sold eggs at what it described as the fair price. The campaign cost essentially nothing beyond the eggs and cartons. It reached approximately 100 million consumers in the first week. The reason it worked was not novelty. It was coherence: the brand that argues for pricing fairness in skincare extending that argument to a commodity that was being priced unfairly in everyday American life.

The operational discipline behind this kind of marketing is instructive. Approximately 80% of The Ordinary’s year is planned, with 20% explicitly reserved for reactive moments. Amy B called this space for magic. The egg campaign took two weeks to execute from idea to activation. That kind of speed requires pre-built muscle: a team that knows the brand DNA well enough to move fast without losing the thread.

The Ordinary’s approach to trust is also structurally significant. The brand discounts once a year, now in April, for a month-long promotion. That is it. “We want purchases to be very considered and sometimes slow because we want you to make the right decision.” The deliberate friction against impulse purchase, combined with genuinely accessible pricing and a 130-person in-house science team, is how the brand earns the credibility to be reactive in culture without looking opportunistic.

Amy B’s framework for internal decision-making was as useful as the external marketing examples. “If it is not a hell yes, it is a no.” And: “What are we willing to be cancelled for?” Both questions are versions of the same test: does this align with who we actually are?