Greetings programs!
Our nouns sofubi saw a little delay via the paint mask factory falling behind due to Covid restrictions (now having been back on the ground in Japan, in many ways they are still in 2020… masks outdoors / indoors , sanitizing at the door by staff for major lunch venues, temp check stations at the entrance of malls )
So while waiting for the paint masks, so we can install our set up at LOFT as planned, we held a mini exhibition using the nouns sofubi mold in collaboration with 12 of the leading creators in Japan.
The details had been posted in the discord, but wanted to post pics here for sure.
The set up was at the Marui department store in Shinjuku… a major thoroughfare for the same consumer who will find the larger Nouns set up in Ginza this Spring.
As explained in the discord, this is not a toy project, but a method for breaking a very specific attention membrane in character culture, for the purpose of having a ripple effect through rest of Asia via small but very specific steps.
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Our discussions with studios have also seen some delay. Some planned calls have yet to occur due to lots of key people leaving Netflix (but moving to studios we are close to and in ongoing talks with)
Our most promising studio discussion is ongoing, but won’t pick up again until the new year, and our sofubi / retail program will continue in the spring, so I will propose an extension for Studio One here shortly.
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This is not a discord type forum, so please remove if unsuitable for this forum.
I almost made this a reply in one post but felt it would be lost.
Thinking about proliferation, I feel we need to focus on direction.
“Engagement” doesn’t work. Neither does “marketing”… when building a brand like this. ( I call it such for ease of communicating what we are all collectively trying to do )
When we were growing Uglydoll, Bossy Bear, and our career, the “tik Tok” engagement of the era was “put your ___ in the hands of celebrities”, and an entire economic ecosystem thrived on the belief that this worked, promoting outlier cases as typical outcomes.
It never ( rarely ) worked. And when it did, it was short term over long term, almost always.
When Obama’s kids brought Uglydolls to school, resulting on us being on John Stewart, or when Kanye and Kim marched out of FAO being photographed with our toys in hand…
No impact.
The “choir” would do a WOoohoo! ( our fan facebook groups ) but the above did nothing to have any impact on culture or long term ubiquity.
Rob Lowe wearing a Paul Frank shirt on the cover of People… it helped celebrities ( rather, the companies who facilitated such ) charge for exposure, but the actual event had little to zero impact.
Urban Outfitters selling Paul Frank shirts in NYC resulting in “hip kids” wearing them everywhere worked. They sold Urban Outfitters buyers but placing the shirts in spots where the UO buyers deemed “cool and hip”…( then they opened Pau Frank stores everywhere so they could look big and sell it… but thats another story. )
The problem is sometimes marketing and engagement works.
Short term. You get a blip… and sometimes, a useful one.
Sometimes new inexperienced retailers would order heavy if they knew we were to go on the Today Show… a show Ive been on dozens of times… Great for making donations to kids during the holidays, but did nothing for culture.
We would be up a million dollars extra that year because of it.
But such made no impact on culture.
Our long term ubiquity was never thanks to short term blips.
Very real impact like Stoopid Buddies being able to convince the Rose Parade organizers to accept nouns into the event…thanks to Nouns being in the Super Bowl ad was 100% real and a massive win.
These are very real beneficial cases to “big things”, but they are cases and not real penetrations of the culture ubiquity membrane.
IMO, based on what I have learned, my best advice is to move away from short term pursuit of engagement and impressions, and focus on longer term sustained melding into culture.
Being found in the Harrods window once does nothing… but being found in windows of shops which have meaning for you, over several years,
while then being discovered at high end furniture shops for home deco maniacs ( which lead to us being featured in the Pottery Barn catalog for a decade ), gift stores at the top slopes in Aspen, hidden stores off the grid on Grand street on the other side of the tracks of Soho, and at Collette Paris, The MoMA, the Whitney to create association for those who pay attention, your favorite band’s tee shirt gift shop at the concert…
All of these, over time, begin to form meaning.
The above wouldn’t work for nouns in most cases ( though it would in some ) but it is up to us to find today’s version of such. Rather than reach eyeballs, we have to create meaning, and be discovered.
Repeatedly.
Last point I would like to make is be it our own brands, or Paul Frank or TokiDoki… these achieved near Hello Kitty level awareness with very little spending.
Very little.
The spending of the treasury seems a bit out of control to me.
Not neccesarilly in a bad way, but feels hyper piecemeal.
Nouns has a brilliant community…
" Whatever comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if we work together. Do you understand? If we stay together we survive." - Maximus Decimus Meridius
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I had to press send and get the kids going.
So my solution to the above, IMO, is to try to think more about what projects might have an actual impact on culture, online and offline. With a down market, real world specialty usually makes a big wave up and presents a great opportunity to take root and create meaning, and be discovered.
NFT themed crypto trade shows and events feel far too low hanging fruit for me.
Preaching to the choir, as they say.
I would rather see nouns at the Bologna Book Fair than another crypto event.
But before the Bologna Book Fair, we need to find where attendees of such like to have coffee, or what they hold in high regard and join forces with them. We should study tribes and seek out their tribe leaders.
So if I see proposal B is going after the would be attendees of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair by appealing to all cafes which feature/ focus on books or doing their best to place nouns on the menu of the Hungarian Pasty shop in up down Manhattan or specialty shops like Diesel Books at the Brentwood Country Mart where most of Hollywood hangs out on weekends, perhaps via proposal C I can take up making sure nouns is present in the world of designer furniture by placing plush dolls as set decoration at “design within reach” and having a space at the leading related trade shows in the EU and in Japan, where many US based high end retail go to order / learn about what’s next ( such as Design Fest at Big Sight )
and perhaps Project D sees the above and takes on apparel, but not by releasing tee shirts and hoping for the best… rather, use a couple dozen shirts to take on culture by seeking out collaborative movements with Human Made in Meguro or Beams. ( or similar… the next Nigo and Beams is always an arms reach away via complex con etc )
Rather than open a coffee shop, where do kids in Seoul love to go for coffee?
Starluxe runs Coffee Bean… lets seek them out.
Boulanger Maison Bukak is fast becoming a super trendy ( hate the word, used for clarity and ease of understanding ) in Korea in my own area in SeongBok… who do they order their pastries from? How can we work with them?
We have an office in the middle of nowhere in Texas. The only cool store there is target.
What if project E dedicated itself to making an attempt to put the nouns glasses on the dog at Target, but only in their 'A" stores, which are primarily in the middle of nowhere… then follow that up with
( BRB my kid left her laptop at home )
Tribe leaders!
Hello Kitty is a tribe leader connector.
In the 90s, if a mall in the USA had a Sanrio store in it, you knew right away it was a dumpy mall. They turned it around 180 but aligning with tribe leaders… and for every tribe leader the masses knew, they signed with 100 the masses would not hear of for years, such as Mori Chax or Tarina Tarantino.
Who is the tribe leader in each music category?
Jazz?
Who is hanging out at Village Vanguard these days?
Who is the next Brand Mehldau?
Or can you work with the actual Brand Mehldau?
Who is the tribe leader in pastries? Pastries in Paris? In Taipei?
But the follow up is as important as the initial surprise.
Discovery must be followed by smart consistency.
The Snoopy x Marc Jacobs effort was step 1, not the thing.
Korea!
Would love to begin work in Korea, in relation to how Seoul impacts HK, Taipei, NYC etc… will put together thoughts for a clear renewal asap.
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