Oatly concentrated brand authority in the team that makes the work

A brand book is how a company delegates judgement. It lets people who were not in the room judge work against a written standard. That is how most marketing departments cover many markets, agencies and licensees at once. Oatly puts that judgement back on people, and its partners keep asking for the document anyway.

"We've always kind of refused to do kind of brand books," creative director Michael Lee said ^[3]. "Whenever we work with a partner, they're always asking us about our brand book. And we don't have one because as soon as you do one, you feel like you have to stick to it, and we'd rather have the freedom to just do something completely different if we felt like it" ^[4]. Lee also said he cannot exactly explain what counts as on brand for Oatly ^[15].

The freedom he describes comes from who gets to approve the work. Lee said nobody can veto what the team is doing, and that the team is not presenting to a marketing director or to sales staff ^[5]. The arrangement dates to 2012, when Toni Petersson became chief executive and John Schoolcraft arrived as chief creative officer, eliminated the entire marketing department and rebuilt it with creatives at the center of the business ^[6]. Lee said a company that wants a distinct voice has to remove the layers of approval that instinctively sand down anything provocative ^[16]. The team that resulted named itself the Department of Mind Control, and it writes its own briefs, sets its own strategy and executes its own work ^[7].

Because nobody above the team signs off, the team absorbs the downside. "When things go well, great. But you also have to take it in the chin when things don't go well," Lee said ^[12]. Oatly's "like milk but made for humans" line drew a lawsuit from Sweden's dairy lobby, which the company then used for press and sympathy, according to Entrepreneur ^[13].

The account offers one test of whether the structure outlasts the people who built it. Schoolcraft departed in 2025 and the structure remains ^[8], 13 years after he built it ^[1]. Lee joined as creative director in 2017, the year Oatly entered the US market ^[9], arriving five years into the model ^[2].

Entrepreneur's own takeaway runs ahead of what the interview shows: that creative risks often get harder as a company gets bigger, and that a company stays sharp only by baking creativity into its structure ^[14]. The first half is asserted here, never measured, and the evidence is one company's practice, uncompared to any peer that kept its brand book. Oatly launched in Sweden in 1994 as an oat-based alternative to dairy with branding the article calls quiet and boring ^[11], which it changed 18 years later ^[3]. New creative employees are told one thing on arrival: "Unlearn everything you know about marketing" ^[10]. The interview does not say how the team hires.