In 2019, we started Lore as a design and development studio. The premise was simple: help companies tell their stories by building beautiful, functional products. Websites, branding, photo and video production — the kind of work where details matter and shortcuts show.
And for seven years, that's exactly what we've done.
We've worked with Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, startups, and everything in between — building long-term relationships with clients who care about craft as much as we do. But when you spend your days helping other people bring their ideas to life, you start to accumulate ideas of your own.
Little side projects. Concepts sketched on Post-its. Problems you notice that nobody seems to be solving well. At first, they stay in the margins — weekend experiments, late-night prototypes. But eventually, some of them start to feel like more than experiments.
That's what happened to us.
Over the past few years, we've been quietly building a portfolio of our own brands in the background. Not because we had some grand plan to become something other than what we were. We just like making things. And we wanted to see if we could apply the same standards that we bring to client work to products of our own.
This year, we decided to make it official, transforming Lore from a client-service agency into a venture studio — a parent company for a growing family of brands that we design, develop, and bring to market ourselves.
Our client services work continues under a new name, and it now sits alongside a portfolio of our own products and brands:
Aesso The Creative Studio
Aesso is where our design and development work now lives. If you've worked with Lore before, nothing changes but the name. Same team, same standards, same obsessive attention to detail.
What has changed is our scope of work. We've expanded our offerings to include native app design and development, SaaS products, and AI tools — capabilities we've been building internally, and are now offering to clients.
The name Aesso comes from a combination of "Aesthetics" (Aes-) and "Kanso" (-so), the Japanese principle of simplicity. Beauty through restraint. It's the tension we aim to hold in everything we design.
Visit aesso.com (opens in new tab)
Déstaire The Travel Publication
Déstaire is a travel publication for discerning travelers. A collection of exceptional hotels, boutique properties, and exclusive private stays in some of the world's top destinations.
The travel media landscape is cluttered with sponsored placements and commission-driven recommendations. We wanted something different — a curated collection of places that we would (and have) actually booked ourselves.
At launch, we're featuring more than 70 properties in over 30 destinations, with new recommendations added weekly. No advertising clutter. No affiliate bias. Just great places worth staying, selected for their design, hospitality, and the kind of details that make a trip memorable.
Accommodations are only part of it though.
We're also launching city guides for select destinations, with long-form visual and written content coming throughout the year. A native companion app is also in the works, giving travelers direct access to our curated stays, restaurants, cafes, shopping, and more in each featured city.
Check out the current collection at destaire.com, and follow us on Instagram to stay updated as we add new recommendations.
Explore destinations (opens in new tab)
Verant The AI Platform
Verant is a proofreading tool that crawls your website and catches grammar, spelling, and clarity issues — the ones that slip past drafts and revisions, and end up live in front of your audience.
It works by scanning your actual published content and flagging problems that in-editor spell-check tends to miss (especially when copying and pasting between programs). Ideal for marketing teams, agencies, publishers, and anyone whose credibility depends on clean copy.
The idea came from our own client work. We'd build a polished site, hand it off, and then watch as typos crept in over time. Verant is designed to catch those mistakes automatically, so teams can address them before visitors notice.
And it's not just AI out of the box. We've built a custom scanning layer that understands how real websites are structured — and learns your preferences and writing style from your existing content. Under the hood, Verant uses a proprietary configuration alongside the latest flagship AI models to surface issues that generic tools overlook.
Simple concept. Quietly effective.
Try verant.ai (opens in new tab)
Madeleine The iOS App
Madeleine (coming to the App Store this month) is an iOS app dedicated to learning French. Most language apps try to do everything. Madeleine focuses on one thing: helping you actually learn vocabulary that sticks.
It's built around the 2,000 most common French words and phrases, delivered through spaced-repetition flashcards designed to move knowledge from short-term memory to long-term retention. Every word and phrase is spoken by native French speakers, so you're training your ear from day one.
But the feature we're most excited about is the reading mode. It uses AI to generate daily stories that mix words you've already mastered with words you're currently learning. Each story is tailored to your exact lexicon — challenging enough to push you forward, while being familiar enough to build confidence.
We built it because the alternatives were either ugly or overcomplicated. Usually both. We wanted something that felt premium and actually helped you learn.
View case study (opens in new tab)Ski Supply The eCommerce Store
Ski Supply is a curated selection of premium alpine gear — tested and reviewed with an emphasis on both performance and design.
This one is personal. Our team spends winters in the Alps, and we've spent years sifting through the overwhelming amount of gear on the market — trying to find the stuff that actually performs, without looking like it was designed by committee.
Ski Supply is our attempt to surface only the best — for enthusiasts who refuse to compromise on performance or aesthetics. Every product earns its place through real-world testing. If it doesn't look good and work well, it doesn't make the cut.
Shop ski.supply (opens in new tab)Five brands with a shared DNA: simplicity, craft, and design that puts people first.
This shift represents months — and in some cases, years — of focused work by a small but dedicated team. And we're incredibly proud of what we've built.
What's Next
Lore as a venture studio is just getting started. The five brands we're launching now are the beginning, not the end. We'll continue to build, to refine, and to launch new products when we find problems worth solving.
And if you're looking for a creative partner who builds with this level of care — who sweats the details and actually ships — Aesso is taking on new projects. We'd love to work with you.