In Conversation: Michaela Webb on brand as underwear

18.11.2025

Michaela Webb, Round’s co-founder and creative director, has been instrumental in designing some of Melbourne’s most beloved restaurants and fresh food experiences. Here, she shares some insight into the studio’s creative process.

When you’re designing a food or hospitality experience, where do you start the process?

Every time we begin a project, it's almost like we are tourists. It's important to have that sense of discovering a new city or a new place – of being lost in it and uncovering those truths.   The idea of wandering, getting lost, immersing ourselves conceptually in an idea is what drives all the creatives within Round. It's what keeps us inspired.   Then, it’s being able to draw from that and create something that really feels of and for that place. It might talk to the history of it, it might talk to the future of it, but it's always of that place.

When you’ve worked on a venue or store that’s been successful, how do you balance being known for that thing versus wanting to explore something else? Can you repeat what you’ve created?

The clients are never the same. When someone else comes along, their skillset is so different to what the last client's skillset was. So, you can never replicate that experience – and nor would you want to.  Just as we try to understand the place, we try to understand the people operating it. To understand what it is they have in their tool kit.   Thinking about a restaurant like Gilt, by Josh and Helen Emett, we spent time with their chefs, their front-of-house teams, their managers – not just the owners. That lets us produce something that’s truly a reflection of them, so they can really own it and carry that brand forward.

Thinking about brand in a food or hospitality context, where do you see the intersections between what you create and the experience that people have in those spaces?

If we think of brand as strategy, then it should weave through every single part of the experience and be reiterated at all touchpoints.  If we think about brand identity itself, it’s about outputs that help support what that experience is trying to achieve. If that experience wants to be playful at times or have a sense of quiet confidence about it, all of those touchpoints need to reiterate that. That includes thinking about what people will say on arrival, what service looks like, down to how people pour drinks.   Then, after the guest leaves, what will they take from the experience? Is there an email that goes out the day after they’ve visited? The more we do with hospitality, the more we realise how much tone – whether written or spoken – has a role in shaping the experience.

Often, people think of brand as the jacket you put on right before you walk out the door. But you’re describing something different.

Brand is your underwear. It’s your base layer. But it’s also about building up those layers with the people you're working with to get it feeling like a true extension of them.

Do you think such a broad scope of food experiences in Melbourne makes it easier for hospitality operators to take risk? Does it encourage experimentation?

It encourages innovation in a lot of ways and it encourages a kind of purism, which some other cities might not be able to pull off. We have whole operations that just sell cheesecake by the slice.  I think Melbourne is a catalyst for innovation. What would be wonderful to see in the future is what happens in cities like Tokyo – which also has that purism and honesty – where they utilise space in a much more economical way than we do here. A space might be a matcha donut shop during the day then turn into a fantastic bar at 4pm. Then on the weekends, it’s a retail store.   This idea of hybrid spaces that change roles is something I think we’ll see more of, especially as rents continue to rise.

How do you think Melbourne’s culture influenced the creation of something like The Market Pavilion?

It feels like a metaphor of Melbourne. I love the fact that you get high and low, there’s a beautiful butcher and seafood place, but you can also grab a coffee and a bagel. I see Melbourne as lots of villages all stuck together – and it feels a bit like that.  There’s also something interesting about Maita being in The Market Pavilion. You’ve got an Asian supermarket within a market – and then within that space, you’ve got more specialty operators with their stalls. It’s a market in a market in a market. There’s scale in terms of the product offering, but there’s also scale in terms of the retailers themselves. It’s a sort of cultural fragmentation that I think Melbourne does really well.