Live From ILTM: How Matter of Form Helps Luxury Travel Brands—From Aman to Belmond—Find Their Voices

Matter of Form is proving that luxury travel brands need therapy—not to fix what’s broken, but to discover what makes them singular in a sea of “elevated experiences” and “art of luxury” clichés.

In this ILTM episode, recorded live in Cannes, Anant Sharma, founder and CEO of Matter of Form, joins Afar co-founder Joe Diaz to dissect why luxury hospitality has become awash with homogenized language and how brands can reclaim their confidence through clarity of purpose. With 60 people working across continents, the London-based Matter of Form has transformed hospitality giants like Aman Resorts, Belmond, Mandarin Oriental, and Lindblad by finding the unspoken truths within organizations.

The conversation explores luxury travel’s eight percent compound annual growth and $1.38 trillion market size, and why bigger isn’t always better when everyone’s competing with identical promises.

Transcript

Joe Diaz: I’m Joe Diaz, an Afar cofounder, and welcome to View From Afar, a podcast that spotlights the people and the ideas shaping the future of travel. In this special series, I’m coming to you live from ILTM, one of the most important travel shows that happens every year. ILTM stands for the International Luxury Travel Market, and the show takes place in a fittingly luxurious city, Cannes, France. The conversations that happen here influence how we think about travel for years to come. Afar editor in chief Julia Cosgrove and I sat down with leaders across the travel industry, from visionary hoteliers to destination innovators, to discuss the trends, challenges, and ideas that are driving hospitality forward. We want to understand what truly motivates these leaders, how their personal stories, values, and visions shape the experiences they create for travelers. Be sure to follow the show to hear all our conversations from ILTM.

In this episode, I’m sitting down with Anant Sharma, the founder and CEO of Matter of Form, a luxury design consultancy that’s built or rebuilt branding for travel clients like AmaWaterways, Belmond, Accor, and many more. But Anant has a deep desire to dismantle and reframe the modern conception of luxury, a topic he addresses on his own podcast, What the Luxe. A self-avowed futurist, Anant puts craftsmanship, adventure, and clear-eyed creativity at the forefront of everything he does, whether that’s transforming a safari business into a safari brand that can last a lifetime, or bringing a heritage trains brand story into the present to help it fuel ambitious growth. We’ll dig into it all today and again on a forthcoming podcast with Anant, because as you’re about to hear, we didn’t have nearly enough time to get into, well, everything.

Anant Sharma. Matter of Form in the house.

Anant Sharma: Great to be here, man.

Joe: Yeah. ILTM day two. It’s great. Excited to have this conversation with you today. We caught up a little bit last night. Today is going to be a little bit about talking business.

Anant: Talking business.

Joe: Yeah. You know we like to do that. So when you look back at the early days of Matter of Form, what problem were you trying to solve and how has that evolved in the world?

Anant: So the problem I was solving for was chronic unemployability. All my life I had a terrible relationship with authority figures. I got kicked out of many schools, and I got up to all sorts of devious entrepreneurial activities prior to setting up Matter of Form. In a serious note, I just needed to feel like I was making something and then listen, you know, with the business and why we were set up. I loved magazines growing up, I loved reading, I loved print design. I loved words on the page. I love photography and art direction, so that was the first thing I loved. The second is I also became quite interested in computers and technology. So when Matter of Form started, it was driven by a love of design, an interest in technology, and also a fascination with human–computer interaction. I was actually quite interested in operating systems like Windows, and then how the Mac took over and the design focus on the Mac. And I grew up in an era where I looked up to [the] Jony Ives of this world, you know, so that led me to set up a business where we actually did nothing to do with what we do today. The business that I set up was an incubation company, so I had a portfolio of various businesses across sectors that we would build for a discounted fee, and we would keep equity.

Joe: And why did you evolve the business to where it is today? And just tell us a little bit about what that business is.

Anant: So Matter of Form today is a luxury-focused brand, customer experience, and content transformation business. So we’re about 60 people. We work across the world. About half our revenue comes from the U.S., about half our revenue comes from the Middle East and Asia. Five percent of our revenue comes from the U.K., which is where we’re headquartered. Isn’t that ironic? Yeah, maybe we go into that later, but that’s what we do today. It was nothing to do with what we started.

So what happened is we went from an innovation business doing this type of thing to doing innovation for bigger organizations. But bigger organizations, the work you do tends to be less innovative. It tends to be helping get their head above water. So our company branched into two places. One was doing e-commerce, so we did the e-commerce transformations for a lot of High Street retailers: Karen Millen, LK Bennett, people like this. We gravitated towards luxury brands because we were quite brand sensitive. We were empathetic, we understood content. We understood things that blunt‑instrument digital agencies didn’t. And then at a certain point, we won the pitch for Aman Resorts and that was probably about 12 years ago. We won the pitch to Adrian Zecha’s team. I remember flying to Singapore and pitching to them at a time where they used to take all their bookings by telephone, and it was really backward. Every brand in the Aman portfolio looked different. And then this whole thing with Vlad Doronin buying the business played out like a serial drama. I mean, it’s worth anyone interested in Aman as a brand to just go back and look at what happened. There were fraud threats and another guy called Omar Amanat, you know, he got involved in this very messy acquisition. There were some big question marks over how the whole thing played out. We then repitched to Vlad. We actually won the pitch again, which was fairly unprecedented because they wanted to effectively get rid of most of the previous team and partners, and we went on a journey with Aman for 10 years, a content and digital transformation journey. And then we took over parts of the brand strategy as well.

So that was our foray into hospitality. That’s where we found our passion. We already were doing big projects in retail and fashion, but I realized I just didn’t have as much of a passion. You gravitate towards the things that work for you, and I knew that the hospitality industry was just something that filled me with joy. I think it’s an incredible industry. It’s full of amazing people. It’s global, cultured, curious, and with a level of intellectual acumen and an abundance mindset that is missing from other industries that were cattier.

After Aman, we won Belmond. You know, we ended up working with COMO, we worked with Mandarin Oriental, we worked with Jumeirah, we worked with most of the major hotel groups, but also a lot of the incredible passion projects that sit in between.

Joe: Because we’re at a luxury travel conference, so there’s a lot of luxury brands here in the hospitality space, and I want to get your sense of this idea around the homogenization of luxury. Is there a homogenization in luxury today, and what do brands need to do if that’s true, to fight against that?

Anant: Well, look, let’s start by painting some market context. You know, we’ve got roughly 8 percent compound annual growth depending on who you speak to. You’ve got a market that’s worth whatever—$1.8 trillion, I think.

Joe: You’re talking about the travel.

Anant: Luxury travel.

Joe: Luxury travel.

Anant: It depends how you slice it up. But it’s a big market, obviously. Consultants will get up on stage and say what a good thing that is. And it’s good for them because there’s more business. It’s not so good actually if you’re in the industry, because yes, it’s a big market, but also there’s a lot of competition and there’s a lot of people trying to describe these amazing sensorial experiences in words that often sound quite similar.

You know, I can basically say a billboard out of the window that talks of the art of luxury, elevated experiences being in the heart of X, Y, or Z. The industry is awash with cliché. And the key problem is this: You can’t tell people how to feel. You need to invite them into a stage that makes them feel something. And that requires confidence. It requires simple language. It requires clarity of expression. But the most important thing is it requires a singular promise.

What aspect of their personality are you appealing to? And then how do you live that promise and help them become that person through the experience? It sounds a little bit ethereal, but we’re not selling features and functions. We’re not selling amenities really, especially in luxury, where these things are table stakes. You know, what we’re selling is self‑actualization. We’re selling something to an aspect of someone. And we are different people in different moments. Within me, I have a dimension that craves spirituality and solitude. I do a silent retreat every year. I give it to our teams should they choose to partake. I have a hedonistic side, you know, that’s strong within me. I need family time. I like to work remotely for a period of time. Whatever.

There are different personas that exist within me. I have gone backpacking with my pals and stayed in hostels not that long ago. But I also am a luxury travel customer. So my point with all of this is: What’s the dimension of someone’s personality that you’re appealing to, and how do you imbue every touchpoint with that spirit and promise?

Joe: You said one word that I think stuck with me, especially for this conference and this group of travel brands, is confidence. I feel like that’s what a lot of these brands, at the end of the day, are truly lacking: the confidence to step into their own shoes and be who they truly want to be, or who they truly are. And I feel like from the limited amount that I know about you and Matter of Form, those are the tea leaves I’m picking up—that you’re really just giving them the confidence to be who they are.

Anant: Listen, we joke that branding is like therapy, and there are some creative companies who exist in my world who think that great creativity is about pulling back the black cloth and telling people how they should be. But we work with people who are very intelligent and highly creative.

Our value is three things: the outside perspective. Right? Because anyone, no matter who you are when you’re within the business, fails to see the wood for the trees. You think things are special that have become table stakes. You end up becoming complacent about things that are special, but they’re just so naturally a part of your cultural disposition. You don’t even notice them. So our job is to help find that.

The second thing is our job is, by buying us, you’re actually buying your own headspace. People hired within a business are there to make the business run. Every project that involves change gets pushed down the line. So when you buy into a consultancy process, we’re buying the time out of you.

The third thing is to understand what’s not said—like what’s the founding spirit? What are the characteristics? We’ve got a good wide berth. We can see what’s happening in the market. We can see not necessarily what you tell us, but how you’re acting as a business. What is your org design? What do you value?

Let me give you an example of this. We were working with two companies who were basically identical. You know, they both had, say, 25 hotels in their portfolio. One was owned by a strong Italian family with a strong voice—a patriarch—and the other similar but with a South African family. Everything comes down to what you value as a business and where you see risk and value, right? So one company did lots of daring things, but actually were very risk averse. And so they spent a lot of money resourcing departments that mitigated the risk of doing things wrong, because they just weren’t willing to tank what they did ever. They weren’t willing to prototype things. It had to be well crafted every time they did it. It’s just like a bit of an example. You know, the org design, the stakeholder disposition—that’s where the truth of the business is.

Joe: I feel like I have like 30 questions that I want to ask you that I’m not going to be able to today. We’re going to have to do this again. Definitely. I need to get you on again because you bring a lot of value to our space. But I want to thank you for being here and Anant Sharma, Matter of Form. Thank you very much.

Anant: Thanks a lot for having me. It’s been great.

Joe: Thanks for joining us for this special episode of View From Afar, recorded live at ILTM in Cannes. In the show notes, you’ll find links to everything we discussed today, as well as Matter of Form’s website and social media handle. Be sure to follow along this week to hear more interviews with industry experts.

You can find more Views From Afar on Afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok, we’re @AfarMedia. If you’ve enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great interviews. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been View From Afar, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Nikki Galteland with assistance from Jenn Flowers, Julia Cosgrove, and Joe Diaz. Music composition from Epidemic Sound. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit Airwave Media to listen and subscribe to its other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.