"I don't think too much about the past. The future is the only thing that lasts"
— Patrick Hanlon
Patrick Hanlon has spent his life paying attention. To language. To ritual. To the small patterns people fall into without noticing. As founder of primalbranding.co and author of Primal Branding: Create Zealots for Your Brand — translated into six languages and taught at universities around the world — he's spent decades helping companies understand themselves as belief systems. Google, Microsoft, PayPal, American Express, Levi's, Shopify, VW. A map of contemporary culture, all in his client list.
But Patrick is, at his core, one thing above all. He's a writer. And a writer who isn't writing, he tells us with a half-smile, becomes difficult company — for himself, and for everyone around him.
We caught him on a Minneapolis morning. The birds were screaming outside his window. His white retriever, Tikka, had recently been standing on his chest. He had already been writing for hours.
What follows is a conversation about flow — the noun and the verb. About rituals. About the cities that change the way you see. And about the unromantic discipline of moving forward, because there's nothing else worth doing.
Where the Rivers Meet
Patrick and his wife Jane live in Minneapolis, though their orientation, he says, is New York. The Midwest was a pandemic-era pivot — a strategic away point with easy reach to both coasts. He can be in Manhattan or Silicon Valley in time for lunch.
But Minneapolis turned out to be the right metaphor.
"Flow is both a noun and a verb here," he says. The Minnesota River meets the Mississippi here. The St. Croix joins them downstream. The waters keep running south, all the way to the Gulf. A city defined by its rivers, and so a city defined by its bridges.
That word, bridges, comes back when he talks about culture too. Hmong and Somali communities sit alongside French, Irish, German, Scandinavian, Chippewa, and Sioux histories. And yet, he notes, some people live their entire lives in Minneapolis without ever crossing the river to the other side of town. Geography invites you to move. It doesn't make you.
Writing Through the Day
There's a rhythm to a writer's life, and Patrick has been refining his for forty years.
Mornings start with the sun ripping up the sky outside the bedroom window. Tikka is fed first. Coffee a fast second. The birds at the edge of the woods scream at each other as the light dials up. He writes until noon. Listicles and spreadsheets get pushed off as long as possible.
For the first twenty years of his career — as a creative director working for other people — that wasn't always practical. He took long Manhattan lunches to cover the fact that his brain refused to transact midday. By late afternoon, something would flip and the words returned. He's been managing his energy around that pattern ever since.
But "writing time" is more porous than it sounds. Patrick writes while walking the dog. While making supper. On road trips — sometimes he takes the road trip so he can write. He has never waited for the muse. He has never used a writing prompt. If there is a deadline, he meets the deadline.
His first company, Thinktopia, opened in 2002 when he was fifty. Levi's, Wrigley, Barnes & Noble, and Microsoft Xbox were among the early clients. In 2019 the firm transitioned to primalbranding.co. At any given moment, five projects are moving through the office — onboarding, building, handing off. The pace doesn't really stop. Flow rises and ebbs.
Rituals, and the Quiet Difference Between Them
Primal branding, Patrick tells us, is in the business of understanding patterns. How moments become rituals. How rituals can be either positive or negative.
"Rituals matter. They produce flow, ease flow, support or suppress flow."
In broad terms, he says, if you want a positive ritual, get a hug. If you want a negative ritual, call your credit card company. Feel the difference.
We do.
It's a useful frame for designing — and for living. Each of us repeats hundreds of small actions a day. Coffee. Commute. The way we pack a bag. The way we leave the house. None of them feel like much in isolation. Over time, they become the shape of who we are.
Travel, Before It Was a Commodity
When Patrick talks about travel, he doesn't romanticize it. He's been glamping. He's slept in ditches. He's flown Moscow to Mumbai via Frankfurt in the middle seat.
But he is sharp about how the experience itself has changed.
"What were once extraordinary passages have become commonplace," he says. He pictures a pilgrim in 1484 walking from Brussels to Rome, entering the city through Piazza del Popolo and being greeted by the twin basilicas of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto. An enchanted dream. Today people walk straight through with their Crocs and roller bags.
There are still moments. One day in Rome, Patrick and Jane walked into a parish church on the piazza and found Caravaggio’s huge painting “The Conversion Of St. Paul On The Way To Damascus” taken down from the wall and propped sideways against the pews. "We could have licked it," he says.”
The point, you sense, isn't that travel was better before. It's that travel still rewards the people who arrive awake.
A Single Moment, in San Francisco
The most lasting moments in transit, he says, rarely arrive on schedule. "There are moments when you want to change the world. There are moments when the world changes you."
He tells us a story.
He was in San Francisco running face-to-face consumer interviews for a client. After each session he gave respondents a $100 bill in cash, and had gone to the bank that morning to pick up two dozen of them. On the way in, he passed a homeless man on the sidewalk wearing only a black trash bag with a slit for his head. No shoes. No hat. No socks. In the city famous for creating fortunes.
On the way out, the man was still there. Patrick handed him one of the bills. The man held it for a moment of rapture. Then he stood up and walked away as quickly as he could without trotting and attracting attention. When Patrick turned back, the man was gone.
He's careful to clarify: that was his own money, not the client's. Though, he adds, that particular client would have done the same.
Patrick shared the story with us not for moral weight. He tells it because it's the kind of thing that doesn't leave you.
Cities, and the Places You Sit to Watch
Clients have taken Patrick to every continent except Antarctica. Paris, Shanghai, Cape Town, Moscow, Milan, El Paso. In each city, he and Jane look for places to sit and watch.
Les Deux Magots, on Boulevard Saint-Germain, is one of their favorites. They once held a table there from lunch through dinner, ordering off the menu and drinking Sancerre while mini-dramas unfolded around them — some of which, he admits, they probably made up.
In New York, it's coffee shops, trains, Pastis in the Meatpacking District, the Maritime hotel lobby. Sometimes the Morgan Library. Sometimes a long walk west down Bleecker Street toward Chelsea, or fourteenth Street on the way to find Duchamp's old apartment.
"When you imagine all the people who have walked these same steps, it reminds you that often the best New Yorkers come from someplace else — Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Duchamp, E. B. White, Bob Dylan, Basquiat, Nabokov."
Paying attention to where you are turns out to be one of the few things that consistently produces good work. It's an idea we've turned over before in Reading the Street: What City Signs Reveal About Us — the quiet conversation cities have with the people who slow down enough to hear it.
A Pen, and an iPhone
Ask Patrick what he keeps close when he moves, and the answer is small.
A pen, always. People give writers pens as gifts. He has been gifted several Mont Blancs. Also, a pen fashioned from a .50-caliber bullet casing. His current preference, though, is the BIC Crystal Xtra Bold. He scribbles on envelopes, sticky notes, yellow legal pads, in the margins of newspapers and magazines. He keeps trying to manage a notebook. They never last long.
He's more omnidirectional. He takes notes on his iPhone.
When we ask what makes him recognize a well-designed object, he hesitates. "It's not a detail. It's the thing as a whole. I have a good eye. I know good design when I see it. Mostly, I feel it."
He traces the instinct back to an uncle who collected nice things and took the time to show him how fine things are made. From there, it became sketching layouts. Then the grid. A way of seeing that began at a kitchen table and never really stopped.
That instinct — feel before specification — is the test we keep coming back to. You can specify a product to the millimeter. The real test is whether someone picks it up and doesn't have to think. A theme we explored in Objects That Move Us: Iconic Design for Travelers.
Comfort, Coffee, and What Actually Matters
For someone who has been on every continent, Patrick's definition of comfort is refreshingly unprecious.
"Comfort is not always a consideration. Coffee is. Pack smart. Wear comfortable shoes."
And then, more quietly: "Sometimes, I dream of staying put. All I've ever wanted is a woman who is in love with me, a guitar and a dog. I am fortunate to have all three."
You sit with that for a minute.
It's the kind of line that reframes everything that came before it. The travel. The cities. The bridges. The flow. Movement is the medium, not the meaning. The meaning is what — and who — you're moving with.
Forward
We end where Patrick keeps ending things.
"Complacency is the last refuge of the unimaginative," he says. There will always be someone smarter, richer, better-looking. Brains, wealth, and beauty are phantoms. Make the most of what you have. Don't get lost in the shadow of material things. "The meaning of life is to build a life of meaning."
When we ask what's next, he answers directly "I know where I've been. I know where I am. I know where I'm going. Without going into detail, I feel a tremendous future moving forward. There's no end point. You just keep moving toward it."
At SOTIYO, we design for the in-between — the commutes, the layovers, the early-morning walks that turn into a small adventure. The objects that travel with you don't determine the journey. But they should never get in its way.
A pen. A coffee. Comfortable shoes. A bag that disappears against your shoulder until you need it. Whatever rituals carry you forward — small or visible, quiet or loud — they are worth designing well.
You can find Patrick at primalbranding.co, on Instagram at @primalbranding, and listen to Primal Branding on Audible.
If this conversation resonated with you, you might enjoy A Conversation with Daniel Basiletti: On Good Design, the Right Place for Everything, and the Freedom to Divert — another conversation about noticing the things most people walk past.
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