Laughing Purple Goldfish: How Small Surprises Transform Your Business Culture

There’s a moment in every customer or employee interaction where something unexpected happens — a small, delightful gesture that defies expectation. It’s the free cookie you didn’t ask for, the handwritten thank-you note tucked into a shipping box, or the manager who remembers your name and your coffee order on your first week. These tiny, seemingly insignificant moments have a name in the world of business design and culture-building. They’re called “purple goldfish” — and when done right, they make people laugh, linger, and come back for more.

The concept of the laughing purple goldfish sits at the intersection of design philosophy, employee experience, and customer delight. It’s quirky on the surface, but underneath it carries a serious message about how brands, teams, and leaders can differentiate themselves not through grand strategy but through small, intentional acts that feel genuinely human. This post explores what it means to build a laughing purple goldfish design into your organization, why it works, and how you can start doing it today.

What Is a Purple Goldfish?

The term “purple goldfish” was coined by Stan Phelps, a marketing strategist and author who became fascinated by the idea of giving a “little something extra.” The concept borrows loosely from the idea of the “baker’s dozen” — the extra donut or bread roll that a baker would throw in as a gesture of goodwill, something beyond what was paid for and expected.

A purple goldfish is any signature extra that a company provides to stand out from the competition. It’s not a discount or a loyalty program point. It’s something meaningful, personal, and often surprising. Think about the breath mint that arrives with your check at a restaurant, or the way certain airlines used to have flight attendants who told jokes over the intercom. These are purple goldfish moments — small, vivid, memorable.

So where does the laughter come in?

The laughing purple goldfish is a specific evolution of this concept. It focuses on joy, humor, and levity as design principles. The idea is that when you build laughter — genuine, warm, human laughter — into the experience of your brand or workplace, you create something that is almost impossible to replicate. You create connection.

Why Laughter Is a Design Principle, Not a Perk

Most businesses treat humor as an afterthought, if they treat it at all. It shows up in the occasional fun Friday email or the team-building event that everyone attends reluctantly. But leading organizations are starting to understand that laughter is not a soft, optional bonus — it is a hard, functional design element with measurable outcomes.

Research from institutions including the University of Oxford has shown that laughter strengthens social bonds and increases trust. In the workplace, teams that laugh together demonstrate higher levels of collaboration and lower turnover. In customer-facing environments, humor done well increases brand recall, boosts purchase intent, and generates word-of-mouth at a rate that advertising simply cannot buy.

When you treat laughter as a design principle — something you consciously build into the structure of an experience rather than hope will spontaneously happen — you start making different decisions. You hire differently. You write copy differently. You design physical and digital spaces differently. You give your team permission to be human in a way that most corporate environments quietly discourage.

The laughing purple goldfish design philosophy asks a direct question: where in your customer or employee journey can we inject a moment of genuine, well-timed, respectful delight? And then it asks you to build that moment on purpose.

The Anatomy of a Laughing Purple Goldfish Moment

Not all humor works in all contexts, and not all surprises land the way you hope. The laughing purple goldfish has a few key characteristics that distinguish it from a gimmick or a stunt.

It is unexpected. A good purple goldfish moment arrives when the person isn’t bracing for it. It comes in the packaging, in the error message on your website, in the note from HR on someone’s work anniversary, in the way a team leader opens a difficult meeting. The unexpectedness is part of what makes it effective — the brain releases dopamine when something surprising and positive happens, and that neurological response is what creates lasting memory.

It is authentic. There’s a thin but critical line between humor that feels like it came from a real human being and humor that feels like it was written by a committee trying to appear relatable. The laughing purple goldfish moment has to feel genuine. This means it often works best when it comes from an individual voice rather than a brand voice, or when the brand voice has been developed with enough personality that it doesn’t feel manufactured.

It is appropriate. This is the constraint that most organizations get wrong when they try to be funny. Humor that excludes, embarrasses, or punches down is not a purple goldfish — it’s a liability. The laughing purple goldfish is always warm, never mean-spirited, and always serves the experience of the person receiving it rather than the ego of the person delivering it.

It is small. One of the counterintuitive truths of the purple goldfish philosophy is that scale often works against you. A massive gesture can feel performative or overwhelming. A small one feels personal. The handwritten note outperforms the expensive gift. The unexpected joke in an automated email confirmation outperforms the elaborate campaign. Smallness is a feature, not a limitation.

Laughing Purple Goldfish in Customer Experience Design

Consider the ways some of the most beloved brands in the world have embedded laughter and surprise into their customer experience without making it the centerpiece of everything they do.

Chewy, the pet supply company, became legendary for its handwritten cards and painted pet portraits sent to customers whose animals had died. This is not humor — it’s deep empathy — but it follows the same design logic as the laughing purple goldfish. It’s unexpected, personal, small, and authentic. The laughter version of this same principle is the brand whose automated shipping confirmation email is written in the voice of the package itself, narrating its journey across the country in the first person and making gently absurd observations about life inside a warehouse.

Zappos built an entire culture around the idea that customer service representatives should feel free to be funny, warm, and human on calls — with no script and no time limit. The result was not chaos. It was loyalty. Customers called back not just because they needed shoes but because talking to a Zappos representative was a genuinely enjoyable experience, one that felt nothing like talking to a company at all.

MailChimp’s Freddie the chimp mascot and the brand’s copywriting voice pioneered a form of tech-company warmth and humor that has since been widely imitated and rarely matched. The small moments of wit in their interface — the hand that shakes nervously before you send your first campaign, the celebratory animations after a major milestone — are laughing purple goldfish moments carefully embedded in a product experience.

What all of these examples share is intentionality. None of them happened by accident. Each was the result of a deliberate decision to treat delight, humor, and surprise as design elements worth investing in.

Laughing Purple Goldfish in Workplace Culture

The internal application of this philosophy may be even more powerful than the external one. Workplace culture is, after all, just a collection of experiences — and experiences can be designed.

A laughing purple goldfish culture is one where leaders model levity without undermining seriousness. Where meeting agendas occasionally include something genuinely fun that isn’t “ice breaker questions” read from a corporate template. Where onboarding includes something that makes a new employee smile and feel like they’ve joined a place run by humans. Where the internal communications team has permission to be witty, and where that wit is used to make important information more memorable rather than to distract from it.

This kind of culture doesn’t just feel good — it performs better. Teams with high psychological safety, a concept developed by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, consistently outperform teams without it. And one of the most reliable signals of psychological safety is the presence of genuine laughter in a group. Not forced laughter, not performative laughter, but the real kind that happens when people feel comfortable enough to be themselves.

Building a laughing purple goldfish workplace means asking where the friction points are in your employee experience and then asking how you might transform at least one of them into a moment of unexpected warmth or humor. The performance review process, famously dreaded by managers and employees alike, could include a question that asks the employee to reflect on the funniest moment they experienced at work in the past year. The weekly all-hands meeting, often a source of low-grade dread, could open with a rotating “this week in bizarre industry news” segment curated by a different team member each time. The annual benefits enrollment process — perhaps the most joyless experience in the corporate calendar — could include copy that acknowledges its own absurdity with enough wit that employees actually read it.

How to Design Your Own Laughing Purple Goldfish

If you’re ready to bring this philosophy into your own organization, the process is less complicated than you might think. It doesn’t require a budget line item or a dedicated team. It requires attention, permission, and practice.

Start by mapping your experience. Whether you’re focused on customer experience, employee experience, or both, write out every touchpoint. Every email, every form, every physical space, every moment of transition. Look at that map and ask: where is there an opportunity for delight? Where could something unexpected and warm and human show up that would be genuinely surprising?

Then ask: what do the people in this experience already find funny or delightful? This matters enormously. The humor that lands in a pediatric clinic is different from the humor that lands in a law firm, which is different from the humor that lands in a craft brewery. The laughing purple goldfish is always calibrated to the actual people in the room, not to a generic idea of what humans find amusing.

Give someone permission. In most organizations, humor dies not because people aren’t funny but because no one feels they have permission to be funny in a professional context. Name someone — or multiple people — whose job includes finding opportunities for levity and acting on them. Make it explicit. Make it valued.

Start small and iterate. Your first laughing purple goldfish moment does not need to be polished or perfect. It needs to be genuine. Try one thing. See how people respond. Learn. Try something else. The accumulation of small, genuine moments is what builds a culture over time, not the single grand gesture.

Measure what matters. The outcomes you’re looking for from a laughing purple goldfish design are not hard to track. In customer experience, look for repeat purchase rates, net promoter scores, and the specific qualitative language customers use in reviews — do they mention warmth, humor, personality, surprise? In employee experience, track engagement scores, retention, and the themes that surface in exit interviews. The presence of delight, or its absence, tends to show up clearly in all of these places.

The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters Now

We are living through a moment of profound sameness. Artificial intelligence is making it possible to generate enormous quantities of professional-sounding content, service, and communication at almost zero cost. The result is a world increasingly filled with things that are technically competent and completely forgettable.

In this environment, the laughing purple goldfish is more than a design philosophy. It is a survival strategy. It is the bet that human warmth, genuine surprise, and real humor cannot be automated — or that even if they can be, people will still seek out the version that feels like it came from a person who cares.

The brands and workplaces that will stand out over the next decade will not be the ones with the most sophisticated technology or the most optimized processes. They will be the ones that made people feel something real. The ones that surprised someone on a Tuesday afternoon. The ones that made a customer laugh out loud at a shipping confirmation email and then forward it to three friends. The ones that made an employee’s first week feel like the beginning of something genuinely exciting rather than the beginning of a long orientation document.

That is what the laughing purple goldfish is about. Not fish. Not the color purple. Not even laughter, exactly. It’s about the decision to make your corner of the world a little more human than you found it — and to do it on purpose, repeatedly, in the small places where no one expects to find anything worth remembering.

Start there. Start small. And don’t be surprised when people start talking about it.