ABOUT
Ales Kernjak
AK Works is led by Ales Kernjak, a brand experience strategist with more than three decades of experience across retail, hospitality, leisure, and service-led businesses.
His work connects business ambition with the way people actually experience a brand, across proposition, service, environment, and delivery.
AK Works is deliberately senior and direct. Clients work with the person shaping the thinking, the direction, and the decisions.
CORPORATE EXPERIENCE
Built inside global brands.
Senior roles where brand strategy had to become stores, standards, service behaviours, teams, and commercial performance. Not decks. Environments people walked into and teams who had to deliver them every day.
General Manager, Retail & Customer Service · Melbourne
Established the global retail department during a formative stage of international expansion, bringing store design, operations, customer service, training, and online under one function. The work built organisational capability, including the in-store treatment model, not only store concepts.
Global Retail Concept Director · Zurich
Architect of PUMA Retail 2.0, developing differentiated global formats from commercial stores to flagships and Black Label, with the visual merchandising and rollout logic behind them. Part of the wider team that moved the retail business back towards profitability.
Head of Store Design & Development and Visual Communication · London · Munich
Sixteen years across European store design, visual communication, and visual merchandising, spanning retail, wholesale, subsidiary, and franchise environments. The work translated brand strategy into physical experience and held it consistent across markets.
WHAT EXPERIENCE CHANGES
What three decades inside brands taught.
A strategy only matters when teams can deliver it.
The most elegant positioning fails at the point where someone has to act on it, every day, without supervision.
Global consistency without local relevance creates sameness, not strength.
A concept that travels unchanged does not arrive intact. It arrives hollow.
Customers do not experience departments. They experience one brand.
What feels seamless to a customer is almost always the result of decisions that were not made separately.
INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE
Concepts do not travel. They have to be translated.
Work across Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia built something more useful than familiarity with different markets: an understanding of how customer expectations, local culture, and operating models shift underneath a brand.
Working with Global Healthcare Co. in Saudi Arabia, Ales supported the transformation of Whites and Kunooz and helped establish retail design capability across a national network of more than 200 stores.
The engagement reinforced the central principle: global ideas have to be translated through local culture, customer behaviour, and operational reality, or they arrive looking imported.
INDEPENDENT
From corporate experience to independent practice.
Ales now works directly with founders, operators, leadership teams, agencies, design studios, and creative partners, bringing specialist collaborators in where an engagement needs them.
Retail taught him how brands become environments. Service taught him how brands become behaviours. Hospitality brings environment, service, culture, emotion, and operations together in a single experience.
That is why the background extends naturally into hospitality, leisure, and competitive socialising. The strongest concepts are not simply well designed. They are relevant to the audience, distinctive in the market, and credible in operation.
SELECTED BRANDS AND ORGANISATIONS
Selected consulting and collaborative experience.
Questions
Common questions
about working with Ales.
There is no handover from a senior pitch team to a junior delivery team. The thinking, the direction, and the recommendations come from the same place.
Specialist collaborators are brought in where an engagement needs them, without losing strategic continuity.
Three decades connecting brand, environment, service, and operations across international customer-facing businesses, where decisions were judged on what customers and teams actually experienced.
That experience now informs work in hospitality, leisure, and competitive socialising, where the same forces decide whether a venue is understood, delivered, and worth returning to.
Yes. Based in Munich, with work across Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia, including Riyadh, New York, London, and Melbourne.
Engagements combine remote collaboration, focused workshops, and in-person work where it adds value.
GET IN TOUCH
Start with the decision
in front of you.
If you are shaping a brand, service, venue, rollout, or experience-led business, start with a conversation about the decision that needs to become clearer.
Experience built inside global brands, brought to the decisions shaping what comes next.
Based in Munich. Working internationally with founders, operators, agencies, studios, and leadership teams.