I’ve been designing temporary structures for exhibitions for over 30 years but there has always been a budget that would at least cover the cost of the materials and labour. Having said I would ‘give it some thought’, I started the usual process of elimination, to try to come up with a solution that answered the brief.

I dug pretty deep into my past experience but every idea I had, would have cost far too much for the one-day event. Then suddenly, I thought I had come up with an idea that had never been used before – I’d make the whole structure out of pallets that could be picked up for nothing at farms around the area.

After 30 years in the business, you’d think I’d have known that most things have been done before, in one form or another and this idea looked like it was going to be no exception.

When I researched standard pallet details on the internet, what came up was evidence that just about everything you could make pallets out of, had been made but I didn’t find a bar counter, which left me some work to do.

I then got lucky – The winner of the ‘Arable Farmer of the Year 2011’ award, Colin McGregor, came to my rescue. Not only did he give me detailed information on the different construction of European and UK pallets, he gave me a choice of hundreds of pallets that he had in stock at his amazing farm estate and even delivered them to the workshop where it was built.

The pallets were bolted together in sections, so that the bar could be transported, a simple MDF top was added and then the whole thing was painted.

The irregular shaped 4.5 metre by 2.5 metre bar was completed for the lowest budget imaginable and the bride and groom were thrilled with the result. Apparently, far more free drinks were served over the counter than at a normal ‘trestle table and cloth bar’, so the bride’s father wants a word with me to ask me to stay out of it in the future.

For the last four years, Agrada has been responsible for the creation of the
Gleneagles Hotel’s in-house magazine. Gleneagles Style 2012, showcases the extensive shopping experience at the Hotel and highlights the brands and designer products that the various retailers stock, as well as promoting all activities, events and facilities available at the resort.

The David Hockney – A Bigger Picture exhibition, evoked those feelings entirely. It’s not often that attending an art exhibition makes me feel that but something about the Yorkshire work struck that chord.

Could it be that the subject matter felt so very familiar, or was it the use of the technology? Actually, there was something else, dare I say, it had a design feel about it. The structure of the exhibition, the layout and the story it told, were so thought out and well, – designed.

Hockney was totally in control of every detail, we’d seen the model of the exhibition, a true design technique if ever there was one, we knew he masterminded the colours of the walls and the flow the paintings, obviously drawing on his stage design skills.

The cohesive nature of the work and the clever repetition, told a story about really observing, looking past the immediate, into the depth of the view. Before actually seeing the paintings in the flesh, I had focussed on all the colours he uses, in the landscape around me – the orange ends of cut wood, the purple on the tree trunks.

I’m sure he has achieved his ambition and that is to make people see richness in the ordinary. He has a great gift and I am one who views his vibrant colours with a mix of envy and admiration but I do feel lucky to have witnessed it.

When Portugal Portfolio, a property letting company, with locations in both Portugal and the Western Cape of South Africa, asked us to work on a ‘brand refresh’, the brief was to retain their well-known footprint along with the orange colour.

Agrada’s solution, was to introduce a new and sophisticated typeface and to encase the footprint and the name within a coloured block. The new format created the flexibility to extend the brand to the other locations and offers, by  simply introducing different colours.

This small, but significant change, has enhanced the overall presentation of Portugal Portfolio and West Cape Portfolio and its application to their website and marketing collateral, has allowed the brand to reflect the modern, upmarket property company that they are.

http://www.portugalportfolio.com

Where do you stand on buying a fake brand?

Well the answer is a no brainer really. Those of us in the business of building brands are horrified by the ever-growing masses of ‘rip off’ brands that are out there. When a small business has to employ someone to monitor and eradicate fake products being sold around the world, it’s a sad state of affairs.

As many people will have seen, Turkey’s tourist areas are home to a massive brand rip off industry. The traders proudly advertise ‘genuine’ and ‘genuine fakes’ which actually differentiates between really well made rip offs and their poor counterparts. Because of the level of the activity, it could be argued that there is unlikely to be a loss of sales for the originals but surely it must damage the brands.

At the risk of being cruel, Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts that on 5th Avenue are modeled on sculptured, buff torsos, do not have the same appeal when stretched over a beer belly and are complemented by homemade tattoos.

There is nothing hidden or under the counter about fake brand retailing in Turkey, it is open, unashamed and treated with a degree of humour by all but the discerning brand lover.

It’s easy to avoid the badly made copies, shoved in your face with a three for ten pounds offer but it’s less easy to resist when coupled with sales skills that would have Mary Portas impressed. A glass of water, a coffee, or a beer, a comfortable seat and a charming assistant, coupled with extremely well made products skillfully sold to you, makes it hard to stick to your principles.

Some might believe that the big brands with their expensive labels and huge margins, have got it coming to them but you have to spare a thought for the smaller businesses whose brands are being copied, that can neither fight it nor brush it off. Basically, I see it as ‘genuine’ theft – don’t you agree?

If you are interested in learning more about any specific project or more
about our experience, please contact us by the usual means and give us the
opportunity to tailor our response to your particular request or enquiry.

We have recently completed two projects for charities, the subject matter being close to our hearts. For golf mad John, The Botham Clarke Celebrity Invitational is held on the wonderful golf courses at Archerfield Links each year, in September. We created the identity and the literature to support the event, which this year raised over £400,000 for Sir Ian Botham and Darren Clarke’s chosen charities.
www.archerfieldgolfclub.com

For horse lover Kay, involvement with Muirfield Riding Therapy led to Agrada assisting with a rebrand and then working on a fund raising calendar. East Lothian photographer John Archibald took the photographs that celebrate the horses, people and landscape that contribute to making Muirfield Riding Therapy such a great charity to be involved with.
www.muirfield.org.uk

In these frightening times of economic downturn, where every positive line of action to protect investments appears to be blocked, I firmly believe that doing nothing is an inherently dangerous course of action to take.

I totally agree with the financial advisers when they say that people should hold onto shares, if they can, until the markets begin their inevitable recovery. I also agree that people shouldn’t sell property for a while, unless absolutely necessary.

As far as the commercial world goes, this, in my opinion, is a time for action. The cake may be smaller but that is a greater incentive to want a bigger slice of it. Most businesses, whether small medium or large have hungry machines to feed, in terms of their staff, premises and equipment costs. Under this kind of pressure, companies will need support, they will need to join forces with ‘like minded’ people and they will need to think laterally about how they stay in business and go forward.

I am not advocating throwing massive budgets at marketing communications but I do feel that, with a little creative thought, companies can open up new opportunities or make more of existing ones.

Business plans are useless if they are written and then confined to a desk drawer to gather dust. What I advocate, is an ‘action plan’ that lives up to its name. A plan that identifies what the company needs to do to feed that hungry machine and to ensure its growth and prosperity. It must have clearly described objectives, action deadlines and clear lines of responsibility for each individual action. Everybody in the business should be encouraged to sign onto the plan and it should be re-visited at regular intervals to ensure that it is being implemented. If the plan is not working – change it.

I have not logged the time I spent waiting for impossibly large files to download, but I guess I could have designed quite a few other things in the time I waited. I suppose I could have found other things to do, like making a cup of tea, popping out to the shops (in Glasgow) and walking the dog (if we had one) or I could have continued to become more and more frustrated.

A few of the sites I used failed to manage the size of the files – we are talking in excess of 100MB.

It seems crazy to me that as the resolution of cameras increase, and in turn, the size of the required files, we end up with something way beyond what is actually needed. For an A4 magazine, we do not need image files that even exceed 10 MB. Downscaling the images, also takes time for the photographer, the media bank manager, or the end user.

In conversation with the photographer on one shoot, she admitted that it was a problem for photographers too, as they have to keep finding more and more file storage.

Cloud storage is an obvious storage solution, but it does not eliminate the downloading problem. The current situation makes the whole exercise extremely time consuming and passing files around very cumbersome.

It seems to me that technology has given with one hand, but taken away with the other

It's obviously difficult, in a one hour television programme, to cover all elements of the proposed transition in detail, however simply declaring a new name to a client and saying "trust me it is right', misleads people into believing that new name generation and in particular re-naming, can be successfully achieved without the input of the business owners.

The conclusion that the existing name of a business is 'wrong' must come through discussion and analysis of why it is wrong and it must involve collaboration with the client.

Getting the name generation process right and bringing the client along with the development stages, is critical to the creation of what will ultimately be the foundation of a new brand and more importantly will promote acceptance and ownership of the brand, within the client team.

The FIXIT Factory name was ultimately rejected and it is a matter of opinion why that was. If the client had been involved in the important stages of the re-naming process, I believe that he would have either signed onto it and stayed with it, or the team would have generated a different, possibly more appropriate name that answered all elements of 'the brief', which may have been written by the consultant but would have most certainly been signed off by the client.

Brand name creation is not an 'add on' to a retail or other business concept it is a fundamental part of the business plan.