AK WORKS · BRAND EXPERIENCE
Strategy is only useful
when people can feel it.
AK Works helps hospitality, leisure, retail and culture-led brands turn strategy into brand experiences that are clear, believable and repeatable.
For brands whose growth has outpaced how clearly people can feel what they stand for.
THE SWEET SPOT METHOD™
Where Product, Service, and Culture reinforce each other.
Brand experience rarely weakens in one place. It weakens when the offer, the service, and the internal culture start telling different stories.
The Sweet Spot Method is AK Works' way of diagnosing those connections, so the brand becomes clearer to understand, more believable to experience, and easier to deliver consistently.
The method becomes practical in the work: reading where the offer, experience and team culture align, and where they pull apart.
SERVICES
Start with the decision that needs clarity.
AK Works partners directly with founders, operators, leadership teams, agencies, and design studios to diagnose the experience, shape the direction, and make the brand easier to deliver across teams, spaces, formats, and markets.
01
Diagnose the Experience
Brand Experience Diagnostic
For brands that need to understand where Product, Service and Culture are aligned, and where they are pulling apart.
02
Shape the Direction
Brand Strategy & Experience Direction
For brands that need clearer decisions across positioning, customer journey, service, narrative and space.
03
Make it Repeatable
Brand Playbooks & Rollout Systems
For brands that need the experience to travel across teams, sites, formats or markets without losing coherence.
EXPERIENCE BEHIND THE THINKING
A senior practice, built from inside the brands.
AK Works is led directly by Ales Kernjak, a brand experience strategist with more than three decades of experience across retail, hospitality, leisure, service culture and customer experience.
His work has been shaped inside Aesop, PUMA and Timberland, and through strategic work across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, spanning brand strategy, store design, concept development, customer journeys, service standards, training and international rollout.
That background matters because brand experience is rarely solved in one place. It sits between what a brand promises, how people encounter it, and what teams can consistently deliver.
Explore the experience behind AK Works
POINT OF VIEW
Brand experience is not built in a presentation. It is built through the decisions people encounter: the offer, the space, the service, the language, the team, and the details that stay with them.
01
Experience is built through decisions, not declarations.
02
Service culture lives inside the team before it reaches the customer.
03
A brand becomes stronger when Product, Service, and Culture reinforce each other.
THINKING
CURRENT SERIESThe Experience-Led
Hospitality Playbook.
An editorial series on hospitality, leisure and competitive socialising: how venue concepts, guest journeys, service culture and brand experience shape the moments that make people return.
Developed with Zachary Pulman Design Studio.
View the seriesGET IN TOUCH
If your brand experience needs clearer structure, start with a conversation.
Use it to clarify the decision ahead, understand where Product, Service and Culture may be aligned or pulling apart, and decide what kind of work is needed next.
More than thirty years of brand experience across retail, hospitality, leisure, service culture, customer experience, and international rollout.
The person you speak to is the person doing the thinking, shaping the direction, and developing the work.
Based in Munich. Working internationally with founders, operators, agencies, studios, and leadership teams.