Find the hits with this one cool trick

I’ve talked a lot on the professional side about Aesop, the skincare brand that makes you smell like a hotel while feeling like a design-forward cool girl, the brand that never ever throws sales, the brand that bars its customer service representatives from talking to you about sports or the weather.

Aesop’s stores are meant to be high-design. You feel a certain way about picking a black & white Helvetica-set product off of a shelf with 50 identical-looking bottles. You can’t just do this anywhere. Each Aesop location is designed by a different architect, meant to evoke some sort of thing about the surrounding context. The Bucktown Aesop is made entirely from salvaged Chicago brick from classic two-flats & factories, for example.

I don’t care about Aesop’s stores, because I don’t really buy Aesop’s products. They’re pretty, I guess. They make for a good ‘gram, for those of you who ‘gram. But their stores are always, always placed in shop-and-bop neighborhoods, and while they by no means provide a complete portrait of the awesome areas in any city, wandering around one is always a guaranteed safe bet.

This is what you want out of travel, really. Find the cool neighborhood that locals vibe in, one that is both irrepressibly of the place and legible in a broader context. Aesop is always there to greet you, or not. And so it is in this energy where, every time I travel somewhere new to me, I have found myself searching for where Aesop places its boutiques, and wandering every one of those neighborhoods with no real agenda.