Kitty and Dude

Firstly, what a great name...

Kitty and Dude are a ceramic company enjoying pushing the boundaries of what you would expect from this world. This is a lovely example of messing with a genre expectation. And having permission to do so because your brand carries no baggage of legacy etc...

How can more established companies take the same spirit into their own product development? Without just using acquisition?

RT

Pop-Up Collaboration

Q: Is it a marketing agency? Is it an exhibition space? Is it a pop-up store?
A: It's all of them. And it's called 303 Grand.

I can't work out if this is the future of collaboration and making stuff tangible or an attempt to ward off the credit crunch by making the most of the space you've got. But either way, I'm in.

303 Grand is a store owned and operated by Street Attack in Brooklyn. From 1 day to 3 months, brands, artists or organisations have the opportunity to create an experiential pop-up store, plus they get the assistance of a marketing agency thrown in.

What a great way to collaborate with a tangible focus and outcome.

AT

Niche Luxury

Rough Luxe is a luxury concept brand with an interesting take on luxury: something like post-luxury, luxury. Status as experience, not consumption. At the Rough Luxe hotel you aren't just paying for the frou-frou of fancy sheets, you are spending the night with a work of art – where each room is listed by artwork. It seems subjective, but then perhaps that is the whole thing: luxury is in the eye of the beholder. And maybe this is a beginning of niche luxury services and experiences?

"Luxury should be an enriching personal experience and not simply the ownership or utilisation of an expensive object. It is a different definition of luxury: time for reflection, the intellectual value of objects - of art, nature, culture, our environment and the people around us, of social and cultural experiences linked to locations as well as the ‘consumable’ items; food, lifestyle objects and events."

AT

The Iconic Apple

I'm fascinated by this one: how objects become icons and how symbolism – their meaning – becomes attached to them over time.

Take the humble apple – or rather not so humble, as since the Bible it had been laden down with significance. Temptation, original sin – and the fall from grace. All that from such a humble fruit. And now it is an icon with a reinterpreted significance: by the other Apple. Their apple is reputed to be in homage to Issac Newton – who observed an apple fall to the ground and imagined gravity. Clever.

And so the apple has switched in symbolism: from religion to science in just a mere couple of centuries.

So when a brand appropriates a logo, they are becoming part of centuries of storytelling around an object or a shape. Quite a legacy to live up to.

AT

Back from Holiday

The end of a long silence: we've been on holiday in the Cotswolds.

There was a lot of sky.

There were donkeys.

AT & RT