Surfing brand Billabong International is moving down stream into retail to better control how its products are sold. An increasing trend amongst the large retail chains is to increase the proportion of merchandise they sell under their own brands. Brands like Billabong can either cop it sweet and sit back and let their share of floor space and sales decline or they can take steps to control their own destiny. It is pleasing to see that Billabong has opted for the latter. Billabong is increasingly seeking to make retail acquisitions as a way of gaining greater control to their route to market. Last year they acquired the California based RVCA brand,  the West 49 retail chain in Canada, Surf Dive’n’ Ski  and Jetty Surf in Australia. Likewise Billabong is investing to build its online sales, which currently makes up 3% of their revenue.

Billabong is not alone in needing to re-think its strategic direction in terms of its consumer interface. For a long time brands have been sensitive of creating channel conflict and ever so respectful to the large retailers. But the respect is increasingly not being returned , brands need to seize the initiative back. Brand management needs to in fact be just that, brand management. Online represents the most obvious space to be managing more intensively. Why wouldn’t a big brand like Billabong not wish to offer the most compelling, engaging and intuitive online offering in its market category?

In terms of a retail footprint the investment required is significant, and for many manufacturing and wholesaling brands beyond their financial means or scale to create their own retail chain. For those retailers there is a need to be a little more creative. Why not seek to joint venture in a retail business? Seek out a number of complimentary brands and underwrite a shared dedicated retailing arm. Yes, it is difficult finding partners of the right size and same motivation, but they are there in many categories. When there is so much focus on co-creating with your customers, why not co-create with your peer band owners.

If your key major retailers are losing the spirit of collaboration and pursuing a more intense self interest position, reinvent your market interface, at the very least creatively explore the options.

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

Art is evocative and emotional and to many people the meaning revolves around the subject matter and composition. Artist, Arthur Buxton invites us to look at art in new ways, to perceive it differently. Engaging and interesting in their intent, he has developed a new way of looking at color schemes.

By removing the context, sunflowers, the sunsets, the lillypads, the landscapes and leaving behind the raw facts,
Buxton allows us to objectively appreciate the colour palette and its harmonies. He leaves us with an openness to
explore our own perceptions and memories. His extraction exercises offer a powerful reassessment of some of arts
great masters. Following are some of his extractions that reveal imagery organised in pie charts.

British Vogue covers 2001 – 2011
Each block in the first artwork in this post is a British Vogue magazine cover in reverse chronological order,
from left to right. Within each block, the strips of colour, represent the five most common colours proportionally
found within that specific issue.

Buxton has made waves in 2011 with his unique colour extraction experiments. The premise is simple but the concept and the results are amazing. They enable the audience to get an incredible sense of how these painters used color. Compare the visualisation of Matisse, a master of bright, bold hues, to that of Monet, who tended toward a lighter palette. The charts might simplify something quite complex but for a lot of artists, they provide a charming and challenging way to look at the art.

“I’ve come up with a novel way of looking at colour schemes. The pie charts are designed to be visually pleasing but also fuction as a colour trend visualization tool. They represent famous paintings, portraying the five most prominent colours in each as a percentage. Using software to analyse images means the only creative decisions I made creating the impressionist pie charts is the shape of the chart and the number of colours it contains. The less arbitrary design choices the better. Information is beautiful.”

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their obsessing about colour. give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

We all know that sometimes life doesn’t exactly live up to our expectations. You come to realise that you have to enjoy
the good times and work through the bad. Yet, sometimes when you are in the eye of the storm it’s really hard to see past the clouds. I myself am going through some changes in my life. As a positive person I try to keep my spirits up but like everyone I could always use a little reminder that things will eventually work out, and that is just what the experience
of these little handmade worlds do.

Some days comfort is the key to functioning like a proper human being. I know your thoughts instantly go to donuts
or chocolate (or maybe that’s just me) but this time it’s Dutch designer and illustrator Kim Welling, who has decided to make our days happier with her Instant Comfort Pocket Box. A set of handmade 3D illustrations collected inside small pocket size boxes with comforting words like: ‘everything will be ok’, you look wonderful today’ or ‘you can do it!’. The small size enables you to carry around these handmade worlds, so you can always pull this little treasure out of your pocket and instantly feel better!

If you’d like to talk to some people who will lift your spirits by talking brand give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

Powerful brand statement:
As with everything I like my Cinematic experience to be served loaded with extra brand personality. I’m much happier giving my money to great independent theatres like the wonderful Sun Theatre in Yarraville or Cinema Nova in Carlton. Not only do I feel like I’m getting better value, but I feel like I’m doing it with people who love movies. They may not be the most up to date with sound or screen size, but easily make up for it with an authentic love for the cinema and our movie watching experience.

That’s why I love this clever, simple online piece for the blog of the Alamo Drafthouse (via my favourite time-sink Devour) . As a brand statement it says so much about what kind of experience you can expect there, I love it. If they where in my neighbourhood, they get more than my business, they’d get my active support. What more can your brand do for you.

Check it out and then ask yourself: What can we be doing to better express our brand?

Click here to view the embedded video.

We love creating power brand statements for our clients, give us a call and we’ll devise some rippers for your brand.

Derek Carroll
Director of Design and silent cinema presence.

Get a regular dose of smart brand thining here or some tweets here

This photo series plays with the perception of stuffed birds. These animals led their life and are now nothing more than an image of themselves, they are no longer flying or whistling. Masked by the former voice signature of each bird through the written word they reveal themselves in a different view, the peeping. Through a mix of colour, letters and image the series evolves to an universal form of language. Raw Color’s ‘Peep’ was presented at the exhibition ‘Stuffed’ during Dutch Design Week, where all the participating designers were inspired from stuffed animals, translated into their own designs.

‘Stuffed’ is the initiative of a group of young, as well as established, designers, artists and entrepreneurs based in The Netherlands. They presented works inspired by the historical collection of animals belonging to the Milieu Educatie Centrum Eindhoven (MEC), together with a selection of the MEC’s collection. ‘Stuffed’ became a journey though the world of taxidermy, skin, living environment, the beauty of life and death, appearance and science. Raw Colour uses colour as the ‘connection between their different practices’ posing questions like, ‘what is the nature of a colour and what is the connection to its physical state?’

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their time obsessing about colour give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

Another post on Facebook complains about Tiger Airways. “Second flight cancelled, no info. Never flying Tiger again”. Within seconds a sense of comradely builds as other ‘friends’ join in to attack. “Missed flight due to check-in shambles. Worst airline ever, don’t fly Tiger”. “Stranded again. Thanks Tiger, first and last time!”.

In today’s social media world, people are empowered to spread the word and it happens instantly. This is, for many brands, the downside to social media.

This isn’t new – especially for Tiger. The low cost airline has more than its fair share of customer complaints, blogs and negative media. The issue is that’s all one way. I couldn’t find any real effort from Tiger to respond to customer concerns.

Any brand should be concerned about negative PR, especially when it happens frequently. However, it can also be an opportunity. Things do go wrong, but it’s how you respond that can be the difference between loosing your customers and actually building ambassadors for your brand.

Having Facebook sites, blogs and tracking comments on Twitter is yet another opportunity to get closer to customers, to show you understand and care. But you have to go beyond the ‘likes’ and build dialogue on the good and the bad. It also helps retain customers by quickly offering something to compensate when the brand disappoints. Smart brands are now also taking the next step with unexpected rewards and random acts of kindness.

Tiger don’t actively do any of this. They don’t even appear to even be listening. The perception is they don’t care and they don’t want to know.

If you follow the conversation online, the brand seems to have high dissatisfaction levels and virtually no loyalty. If so, the brand is in serious trouble. It’s not perceived as a brand of choice (even when considerably cheaper). This forces the brand to constantly attract new, unaware customers – and spend significantly more to do so.

Being budget is never easy but it has to be about more than price. Most budget airlines get this. One example is America’s Southwest Airlines. This is a powerful brand that has built a distinct and quirky personality that connects with its customers and works hard to deliver memorable experiences. Often cited as the world’s most successful and loved discount airline, Southwest boasts 1.4 million likes on their Facebook page, an innovative “nuts about Southwest” blog and no shortage of stories of positive experiences.

So what’s next for Tiger? The brand needs to be completely repositioned. With Virgin now moving more upmarket to compete with Qantas, the time could be right. However, there is a massive caveat on this – the brand needs to be built from the inside first. It doesn’t matter how sexy they look, what they call themselves or any gimmicks they create to get attention if they don’t have a solid foundation for the brand.

Tiger has to get the basics right and then look beyond ‘being cheap’. It needs to uncover its compelling truth, to unite its employees and truly, deeply connect with its audience. The new brand needs to build understanding and commitment amongst stakeholders who represent the brand. It must also actively listen and build dialogue with its customers and then constantly seek opportunities to delight. Ultimately, the aim is to inspire employees to consistently seek ways to deliver memorable and valued brand experiences. The result will be measurable improvements in the customer experience, organisational performance and the brand’s reputation.

Michael Hughes
Director of Brand Strategy

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By reading our Madly blog by now you will know that we are obsessed with a number of things, some of those brand related and others slightly strange. However Nexus Vomitus takes obsession to a whole other level. It is a collaboration between artist Millie Brown and opera singers Patricia Hammond and Zita Syme. You can still buy the artwork for
£1,500. I think that says it all.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SHOWstudio documented this one-off performance of stark contrasts, of vivid color (Millie created a rainbow-like spectrum of vomit on canvas) against the sterile white room, and the angelic sounds coming from the opera singers
as juxtaposed against Millie’s guttural noises, the experience was full of contradictions.

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their time obsessing about colour give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

It’s not unusual for a designer to become consumed with a single project, think of Stefan Sagmeister’s AIGA poster. For Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar their obsession, a project called Raw Color, even gave their studio its name (the project has since become known as 100% SAP to avoid confusion). 100%SAP is visual research about vegetables and the power of natural colour. Vegetables are purified to their visual essence ‘Raw Color’, a natural ink to feed a new printing process which enables the viewer to watch the posters print slightly grow.

Raw Color silk-screened a pattern in special absorbent fiber onto a sheet of paper, ran a few raw beetroots through
a juicer, and waited as the liquid seeped slowly through the fibers, in effect printing the pattern with a dark red “ink.”
They took the project a step further by creating a coded Pantone-like system with vegetable dyes, extracting intense
blues from the juicing of a red cabbage, a dove grey from a white beetroot, and combining vegetables to create new
colors and shades.

What connects each stage of the 100% SAP project — and what unites Raw Color’s work in general — is a steadfast devotion to the exuberant exploration of color. “White isn’t wrong,” says ter Haar, “but it does mean you don’t have to make a specific choice.” Their work incorporates fashion, photography, styling, and graphics, and as Brach points out, “Color is a really nice connection between those disciplines. We use it almost as a material, and it’s transformative the way it can make something seem hard or light or heavy.”

Raw Color discovered the three strongest pigments — red cabbage, beetroot, and pumpkin — were remarkably similar to Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. They filled the cartridges of a Canon printer with the natural dyes and created a series of striped inkjet prints. Most recently, they were contacted by a Dutch fashion label asking if the duo could use their vegetable tints to dye textiles for an upcoming collection.

The 100% SAP project not only reinterprets the vegetable putting it into a new context but has created a natural Pantone-like system.

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their obsessing about colour.
give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

Regular readers will already be familiar with the recent innovations taking place in the world of pop-up retail/brand experiences, from the beautifully evocative Cognac brand Martell, to the brand with balls Beatbox Burgers. A recent commission by appliance specialists Electrolux is about to be launched – a portable dining experience. The Cube restaurants will be popping up on a series of landmark sites across Europe over the course of 2011, starting with a placement on top of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, Belgium. The aim is to create a brand experience that surprises and inspires guests with fantastic tastes and never-before-seen views, ultimately stimulating them to explore their own creative boundaries next time they entertain friends or family at home.

The Cube is an ephemeral restaurant, an exceptional place, a unique opportunity to experience “dining with a view”.
It is outstanding as far as cuisine is concerned, an ideal demonstration of Electrolux’s know-how. The Cube is a unique architectural performance. Not only due to the place where it is set up, but also through its design: an organic and translucent place, a digest of technology.

“The Cube by Electrolux will offer guests wonderful, exclusive cooking and food experiences.” says Neil Gannon, Director of Marketing expertise at Electrolux “Whilst guests enjoy the evening, we also want to give them the opportunity to interact and learn from the professionals we work with being the trusted supplier of many top-chefs
and fashion specialists. Showing their professional shortcuts we want to show people it doesn’t have to be difficult
or expensive to create great experiences as long as you have the right tools.”

The Cube will feature a different hand-picked resident chef, with an audacious technique and unlimited inventiveness,
at each venue and will offer tailor-made recipes using locally sourced ingredients and all prepared on state-of-the-art Electrolux appliances. When guests first arrive the 140sqm space will be open for entertaining and some great sight seeing, especially from the external platform. When dinner is served the concealed dining table will drop from the
ceiling so as to sit the 18 guests before being raised again for after dinner drinks and mingling.

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their life eating, sleeping, thinking about brand
give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

Spudbar was founded in Melbourne in 2000, born out of a frustration at the lack of a healthy, great tasting, healthy feed that was quick, convenient and value for money. It has been on a mission from day one, to create a new category of food offer that fuses natural goodness and big flavours into the nutrient rich gem that is the steaming baked spud. The potential of the brand was clear, the question was how to realise that great potential by taking the Spudbar brand to the next level.

When we began working with Spudbar they had 9 stores around Australia and was struggling to own a space in the market compelling enough to grow the business to the next level.

We were engaged to give Spudbar a complete brand overhaul. We conducted a brand audit to look at the Spudbar brand from the inside out and a comprehensive competition and market review to look at the brand from the outside in. The more we immersed ourselves in the brand the more it became apparent that Spudbar could greatly benefit from a new direction. A direction that was truly grounded in the humble potato, and more deeply connected with a market need.

What Spudbar needed most was a reason for being and that had to come from the brand up. To achieve this we immersed ourselves in their market segment, generated some clear qualitative market insights from customers, ex-customers and non-customers, and led a brand strategy re-think to provide a clear vision for where the brand and its offer could most potently be positioned for success in the market.

We developed the Spudbar brand charter, a roadmap defining how the brand needed to act, feel, speak and look to deliver a 360 degree experience that delivered on the newly defined brand proposition. We defined the drivers for the brand strategy as Natural Goodness, Surprisingly Delicious, Local Groove, Sassy and Easy. And we identified Spudbar’s brand personality as Real, Lively, Imaginative, Passionate and Engaging. These values and personality attributes were the driving force behind building the new look and feel. Spudbar’s brand image had to richly and evocatively reflect the brand’s proposition of local, authentic and a purveyor of potato heritage.

The key to developing the Spudbar brand identity was unlocking the cues of the visual language of one-off local cafes. Whilst these cafes seem disparate and highly individual, when explored as a group there are many similarities in the way they present themselves to market, often driven by a limited budget. The lack of polished design is a part of what identifies and differentiates these local, one-off cafes and restaurants. An example is their menus, which are often hand written on blackboards, or tiles or paper stuck to the wall, they rarely include photographs of the food. By unlocking the code of visual language for these high-loyalty, non-franchise food businesses, we developed the Spudbar brand identity to work in a similar, non-cookie cutter manner.

The brand identity design solution included two defining elements that work together to drive the brand experience from a visual perspective. The first is to identify each Spudbar by its location, we changed the organisational mind-set from owning multiple stores, to having local unique store in multiple locations. The stores changed from being called ‘Spudbar’, to ‘Richmond Spudbar’ or ‘Hawthorn Spudbar’, with a new emphasis on the local identifier. The second defining element was the integration of local street art into the store environment. The brand identity system we developed integrated the art work of a well known and very talented Melbourne paste-up artist. For each store a signature piece of art is created, that piece is ‘pasted’ to a prominent wall in-store and becomes a feature of the experience. The greater brand identity also incorporates a suite of ‘spud inspired’ illustrations from the same artist.

The most defining visual elements of the brands identity are hand-made from the lino-print Spudbar brandmarks, the store signage and interiors, the clipboard menus and a handcrafted typeface, reflecting the D.I.Y nature of local cafes.

In designing the complete brand experience for Spudbar we have developed a suite of elements including, corporate stationary, takeaway packaging, in-store and take home menus, uniforms, internal and external signage, website, marketing collateral, in-store environments, furniture selection, Art Direction of artwork and photography and typography.

“The brand definition work and brand identity design Truly Deeply developed for our Spudbar chain of healthy food stores has blown the lid on the potential for our business. We believe what was previously a nine store franchise now has the market positioning, store design and brand image to expand into a significant national network. As a return on business investment I can’t rate the brand work Truly Deeply produce more highly.”

Ant Morrel
Spudbar Owner & National Director of Marketing & Sales

Spudbar recently opened their first two branded and re-designed stores in Richmond and Hawthorn two inner suburbs of Melbourne and the results is a ‘dialled-up’ brand experience on all levels. Spudbar has created a space that is inviting and comfortable, a place for locals and a place that is uniquely on-brand.

The strength and longterm equity of the Spudbar brand will be driven by the solid strategic framework that has been developed. The strategic framework provides the backbone for the majority of decisions the business will make day-to-day.

Strategy is often seen as a separate discipline to design. For the past 10 years we have focused on the integration of strategy and design to deliver highly unique and effective brand experiences. Spudbar demonstrates how these brand disciplines interweave to create a rich brand experience with layers of meaning and personality, that connect with the market in a powerful way.

Since the launch sales have increased by 20% in month on month, store on store comparison and continue to grow.

We would urge you to go down to the Richmond Spudbar on Swan St or the Hawthorn Spudbar on Glenferrie Rd and soak up the atmosphere.

If you would like to know more about how combining brand strategy and design can take your brand to a new level, give us a call and organise a lunch date at one of the Spudbar store, because the proof is in the Spuds.