Shumi is a strategic brand and product practice built on a simple belief: the things worth making are made with intention, and the things worth keeping are built to last.
We consult — shaping brand strategy, positioning, and creative direction for clients who own the resulting work. And we create — developing our own brands and products with leading manufacturers across Asia, designed for markets in America and Europe.
The discipline is the same in both.
Only the name changes.
Only the name changes.
Consult..
Brand strategy, positioning, and creative direction for founders and businesses navigating growth, repositioning, or entry into new markets.
Consult..
Brand strategy, positioning, and creative direction for founders and businesses navigating growth, repositioning, or entry into new markets.
Brand strategy, positioning, and creative direction for founders and businesses navigating growth, repositioning, or entry into new markets.
Create.
Original brands, products, and intellectual property — developed in partnership with leading manufacturers in Asia, built for the world.
Advise.
Long-form counsel for founders, leadership teams, and creative directors working through positioning, range strategy, market entry, and the organisational decisions that shape a brand.
Lead.
The senior brand seat, part-time. A Chief Brand Officer's remit — through scaling, repositioning, or a listing — without the full-time hire.
ABOUT / WHO WE ARE
A practice, not an agency.
Shumi is a strategic brand and product consultancy founded by Lawrence Garwood — drawing on twenty years of work across London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the United States, and clients including Herman Miller, MillerKnoll, Google, the BBC, LVMH, HAY, Adidas, and the Guardian.
The name comes from the Japanese word Shumi (趣味), it means the pursuit one chooses to take seriously — something made meaningful by attention, care, and time.
This practice is ours. Every client who comes through the door has a shumi of their own: a business, a brand, a product, or an idea they’ve built and care about getting right.
That is the work — taking their pursuit as seriously as they do.
We work upstream, at the level where brand meets business — positioning, meaning, category strategy, and creative direction. The decisions that determine whether a brand becomes a category-defining name or an interchangeable one.
The economics of manufacturing have shifted. The businesses winning the next decade are the ones building a brand, not just a capability. That shift is the work Shumi exists to do.
We work with founders and businesses ready to think more clearly about what they're building, and with manufacturers and partners globally to bring their own ideas into the world. The two sides feed each other. The discipline is the same. The two sides feed each other. The discipline is the same.
The discipline is the same.
What we believe.
Clarity over noise. Meaning over trend. Timelessness over fashion.
How we work.
Senior and embedded when it counts. We hold the brand seat at the top table, set the standard, and leave your team a system they can run — not a deck they can't.
Shumi is a strategic brand and product consultancy founded by Lawrence Garwood — drawing on twenty years of work across London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the United States, and clients including Herman Miller, MillerKnoll, Google, the BBC, LVMH, HAY, Adidas, and the Guardian.
The name comes from the Japanese word Shumi (趣味), it means the pursuit one chooses to take seriously — something made meaningful by attention, care, and time. This practice is ours. Every client who comes through the door has a shumi of their own: a business, a brand, a product, or an idea they’ve built and care about getting right.
That is the work — taking their pursuit as seriously as they do.
We work upstream, at the level where brand meets business — positioning, meaning, category strategy, and creative direction. The decisions that determine whether a brand becomes a category-defining name or an interchangeable one.
The economics of manufacturing have shifted. The businesses winning the next decade are the ones building a brand, not just a capability. That shift is the work Shumi exists to do.
We work with founders and businesses ready to think more clearly about what they're building, and with manufacturers and partners globally to bring their own ideas into the world. The two sides feed each other. The discipline is the same. The two sides feed each other. The discipline is the same.
The discipline is the same.
Clarity over noise. Meaning over trend. Timelessness over fashion.
How we work.
Senior and embedded when it counts. We hold the brand seat at the top table, set the standard, and leave your team a system they can run — not a deck they can't.
WHO WE WORK WITH
Shumi works with companies who have outgrown the generic — and with founders and operators who know that the next stage of their business is a question of clarity before it is a question of execution.
We help with:
Positioning. Defining what a brand stands for, and against, in the market it's entering or fighting to lead.
Growth.Sharpening a brand that has scaled faster than its system.
Repositioning.Finding the voice and form of a business that has changed.
New markets. Translating a brand for audiences and geographies it wasn't built for.
New products.Developing original product lines, from concept to market.
Founder counsel.Long-form advisory for the decisions that don't fit a brief.
We are not category-specific. The patterns are the same across fashion, furniture, food, technology, retail, hospitality, and consumer goods — which is exactly why our perspective travels.
CASE STUDY Case Study 01 — Repositioning a category-leading home brand
Restraint isn't the absence of confidence — it's the expression of it.
A category-defining home and lifestyle brand engaged Shumi to address a widening gap between its premium aspiration and its day-to-day brand expression. The business had scaled faster than its system: visual inconsistency, promotional dominance, and the absence of a shared definition of "good" had quietly eroded the authority the brand was built on.
Shumi's work began upstream — defining the emotional centre of the brand (confidence, not glamour), establishing a hierarchy across product categories, and building the editing discipline the organisation had been missing. The result was not a rebrand. It was a recovery of clarity: a brand that knew, again, what to leave out.
Case Study 02 — Brand strategy and organisational alignment for a category-leading manufacturer
A brand is only as strong as the organisation's shared understanding of it.
A leading manufacturer, with an established OEM business across global markets, engaged Shumi to build the brand foundation needed to compete in Western consumer markets under its own name. The work began upstream — a structured diagnostic of brand readiness, alignment across leadership on a single definition of the brand, and a clear emotional centre the business could build from.
The outcome wasn't a marketing campaign. It was a shared language for brand decisions across the organisation — the foundation a manufacturer needs to become a brand, not just a capability.
Restraint isn't the absence of confidence — it's the expression of it.
A category-defining home and lifestyle brand engaged Shumi to address a widening gap between its premium aspiration and its day-to-day brand expression. The business had scaled faster than its system: visual inconsistency, promotional dominance, and the absence of a shared definition of "good" had quietly eroded the authority the brand was built on.
Shumi's work began upstream — defining the emotional centre of the brand (confidence, not glamour), establishing a hierarchy across product categories, and building the editing discipline the organisation had been missing. The result was not a rebrand. It was a recovery of clarity: a brand that knew, again, what to leave out.
A brand is only as strong as the organisation's shared understanding of it.
A leading manufacturer, with an established OEM business across global markets, engaged Shumi to build the brand foundation needed to compete in Western consumer markets under its own name. The work began upstream — a structured diagnostic of brand readiness, alignment across leadership on a single definition of the brand, and a clear emotional centre the business could build from.
The outcome wasn't a marketing campaign. It was a shared language for brand decisions across the organisation — the foundation a manufacturer needs to become a brand, not just a capability.