Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. This is Jeffstaple again, founder, creative director of Staple Design and Reed Space. In this class, I am going be talking about the branding collateral items that really add to the entire full picture of the product that you've done. In previous classes, I've taught you how to make, for example, a t-shirt, a brand, a product. But now that you've made the product, there's so much competition now in this day and age that I feel that the actual wrapping of the product, things like hang tags, stickers, collateral items, these things that aren't the actual product that you're selling, but all the things that are orbiting around your product are almost just as important because they're the things that are differentiating you from the competition. Whether you're making a t-shirt or a pair of jeans or a shirt or whatever it is, you're making a great product, but it's not necessarily telling the complete story of your brand. Why you started your brand? What your brand ethos is? What's your mission statement? Hell, what's your website, right? Your clothing might not necessarily tell all of these things, and maybe it shouldn't tell all of these things because then it'd be a really weird-looking clothing. So, you need the brand elements, you need the brand collaterals in order to tell the story of what your brand really represents. By the end of this class, I want to see you guys submit to me examples of your branding collateral items. You know what? I dare you to think completely outside the box, branding collateral items that actually are on your garment. So, we're talking about labels, main labels, secondary labels, trim labels, even buttons, and then some branding items that sit outside of your product. So, that is maybe hang tags, poly bags, packaging, things like that, stickers. These are things that are not part of the garment itself when it's being worn and oftentimes it's just part of the unboxing process if you will, the unwrapping process, and oftentimes they might get thrown away, but it's in those few seconds that the consumer is holding those items that really makes it really important. So, we're going to go over both of those types of branding collateral materials.
2. Main Label: So, let's dive right into it. Let's start with the label. The label is probably the most important part of any brand. If we look at cross category of any product that you want to make, anything that you want to make under the sun, you pretty much need a label on there of some sort. Why? Because if you don't have a label on it, you're essentially a commodity. Right? So, what doesn't have labels? Cut-ups don't have labels, toilet paper doesn't have labels, like tissue paper doesn't have labels. These are commodity items. But if you want to brand your item and if you want to tell the world that somebody designed this, somebody put some care, effort, and originality into this product, you need a label to identify that to the world. So, I'm going to go through some of the different labeling techniques and also some of the different styles that we use at Staple just to give you some ideas on how to create your own label. There's three main kinds of labels in terms of technique. So, on our t-shirts for Staple, we do a label that is essentially a no label. It's a label that is printed right onto the garment and so you have no label but you still have the purpose of a label which is identifying what the brand is. I do this on t-shirts because I don't want the label to actually bother the wearer's neck. So, that's why we do with no label on this one. So, this is a printed-direct-on-garment label. Now, the other kind of label that we have is a printed label. So, this is an example of a printed label here. But a printed label is a piece of fabric with your artwork and logo, silk-screened or printed onto the label. Then the third type of label that we have is the woven label. Typically speaking, this is the example of the woven label. A woven label generally gives the impression of higher-quality, higher cost. A little bit more custom. There's this era of sort of like value to a woven label. So, we put our woven labels typically on our cotton sew items to kind of represent that as well. When you get down into it, a woven label is much more permanent than a printed label or printed-on-garment label. Woven labels really stand the test of time. It's a label where the artwork is actually stitched right into the label itself. So, it doesn't matter how many times you wash this, it's not going away. It's going to stay the same in terms of color richness and sharpness. To me, woven labels look really really great. The pros and cons, woven labels have a much higher minimum quantity than printed labels do. So, if I'm not mistaken, woven labels you sort of have to make in the 5,000 piece rings. So every label, for instance this label that says M for medium, you have to make 5,000 of those, 5,000 of large, 5,000 of extra-large. So, you do have to make a lot. But they're pretty cheap per unit. I mean, you're talking about around 10 cents a label. But when you're making 25,000 labels that tends to add up. For Staple, we don't change our labels every season. We keep the same label going every single season, and there's some argument to that. So, some designers and brands think 'Keep the same label. Keep it consistent.' On the flip side of the coin, if you want to be really really creative and every year you want to create a new logo for your brand and you want to express your brand in a new way every single year and you want to create new labels every year, by all means do that too. There's definitely two sides to that story. I personally kept with the consistency one. I've always been really enamored and respectful of brands like Polo, Ralph Lauren, and Echo, and LRG and stuff. These brands have just had the same logo for the longest time. Like Nike Swoosh, they never change the Swoosh or ever do anything with it. So, if you're trying to create a brand out of longevity then I would suggest keeping the same logo and label all the time. Printed labels, again, these types much cheaper, lower minimum order quantity. It's much cheaper to make. There's almost no minimum. You can make a couple of 100 of these labels if you wanted to. Then the the printed-on-garment one, so this style, these also have very low minimums. I mean, in fact you could say there's no minimums. You're just making one for every garment you're making. So, if my whole entire collection was printed on garment, I would have no stock on labels, which would be kind of cool. But I like labels too much as anesthetic so I want to keep using labels on some things. So, those are three wide buckets of what types of labels are. There are other kinds. You can get really creative. For instance, you could do a leather patch. So, a lot of times on denim you'll see a leather patch label. But in terms of mass quantity and being able to actually do lots of them, these are the three main kinds: printed, printed directly on the garment, or woven.
3. Secondary Labels: What's even better than one label? Two labels. So, not only should you have a main label, you should also have secondary and possibly even tertiary labels, and obviously, these should play down from your main labels. I think your main labels should be your biggest most prominent, most obvious label. Secondary and tertiary labels are really cool because this is where you can actually tell the message and inspiration behind each of the garments, or maybe your whole collection. The main label should really be just matter of fact. It should be brand name, logo, where it's made, maybe your url, and that's about it, and the size, of course. But going beyond that, secondary and tertiary labels allow you to sort of really tell the true brand and what's going on in the concept, what was your messaging behind it. So, as an example, this is our main shirt. I showed you our main label. Our secondary label is actually hidden under here. So, when you're wearing the shirt, you wouldn't even see it. It's really only when you're like walking around that it might flash a little bit, or it's really for the wearer only. It's only for the owner to know that it's there. Now, on this label, we're able to put messaging on it. So, this one says like classic fabric, modern design, originally lower east side, born 1975, a positive social contagion. All of these things are set on this label, and it wouldn't really make sense to put that on the main label. It definitely makes sense to put it on a secondary label like this. So, this is a great example of a secondary label. The other obvious secondary label example is obviously on denim, and you guys have all seen this before. So, our main label is here on our denim which is a printed label actually, and we actually went one step further with our main label and we printed our pigeon poop underneath the main label so it's sewn over it like that. But the secondary label on this is this one here, the leather patch, and this is very common on a lot of denim. It actually helps to keep the belt staying on your waste. It adds an extra level of friction on there. So that was the original purpose of the leather patch back there. But again, this is a great place to just put in a lot more detail information. Nineteen seventy-five, again, the code number. It even has our original addressed between Stanton and Rivington. It even has a funny little tagline here that says customize your community merchants, so just trying to stay local. So, you can have a lot more fun on this that you wouldn't do on the main label. So, secondary labels, super important. Again, labels stay on the clothes. It sounds really obvious. But people don't cut the labels off normally, unless you really screwed up and made like a horrible feeling label. But if the label doesn't bother to wear, they're going to leave that on for the rest of their life. So, anytime you show your garment off to people, or somebody asks who made that, they can easily access who made it. In fact, on a shirt like this, they don't even have to take off the garment. They just look at it right down there and say, "Oh, it's a Staple shirt." I mean, you got to think about the consumer as well, like you as the designer, obviously know what brand you're designing, you live it and breathe it every day. But when you sell a shirt to somebody in the middle of Korea and he likes your shirt, he might not always know your brand name. If a friend comes up to him and says, "Hey, that's a cool shirt, where'd you get that?" He might not be able to be like, "Oh, it's a Staple shirt." Like he owns hundreds of shirts and hundreds of brand and he's not yet a loyal brand follower yet. So, he might be like, "Oh, this shirt. Oh yeah, it's Staples. It's cool." So, that's where labeling really helps to identify your brand to other people as well.
4. Trims: I've gone over the main label, I've gone over secondary labels, tertiary labels, your second third labels, and now I want to go over trims. Trims, if you ever think of the Levi's red tab, that's a trim. If you ever look at Majella and you see they have the four white bar tags in the back of every garment, those are trims. So, trims are great identifiers of your brand without having to say your brand name or show your brand logo. There little which we internally called tricks and do-thats that add to a garment. They don't cost a lot of money, per se, but the added feature adds a lot of value. So, as an example, a different colored rivet on a pair of denim might only cost a couple of cents, like literally three to five cents, but the perceived value of that could add $5 to $10 to the cost of that denim, just because of this little metal rivet you have exposed somewhere. So, I'm going to go through some of the trims that we do just to give you some examples of some of the trim work that we have. On our shirt here, this is a great example of a trim. We have a basic shirt. It's got our graphic. It's got our embroidery. I showed you the main label. I showed you a secondary label. Now there's two pretty cool trim details on the shirt and it's for how we do our spare button. So, on button down shirts, they often sew a spare button down on the packet so that in case you lose a button, you got a matching button of the same consistency. So, on our spare button area, we actually held it down with a contrast colored stitch that shape's in S. So the S actually holds down and outlines the spare buttons. Now, how much did the stitch cost? How much did changing it from blue to white cost? Probably nothing. I mean, to the factory, they don't care. It's just a stitch, they just have to change the color. But to a wearer and to a buyer who who sees this, that's a level of appreciation and thought that they really are like, that's really cool that they did that. So, this is how you get a customer for life by doing stuff like that. It's one of my favorite features that we've added to the button down shirts. Then on the back now, oftentimes I think when you dry a shirt, I want to have a way of just being able to hang it on a hook. So, we could have just done any old loop label or sell fabric thing, but we went and sourced this really beautiful woven a knitted as Aztecs Navajo style loop label, beautiful to touch, beautiful to feel, beautiful to look at, and this is what we use as our loop label for that, so this is another nice trimmed detail. On our denim, we go really, really ham on the trims, we go crazy on the trims. Why is that? Because for our denim, we want our denim to be pretty much basic, we don't want to make crazy bottoms that are bright and loud. We want basic bottoms. But we still want the wearer to be able to feel unique and feel valued in what he bought, because we know what we're up against. We know that when it comes to pants, you can buy ZARA , H&M, UNIQLO, for a fraction of the price. So, the only way that we can compete is by adding individuality and something special and custom to our jeans and our pants. So, I'm going to go through some of the trims that we do on our pants. I told you about the labels. I told you about the main label on the back, the back label. So, first of all, on the back pockets, we've done our logo as a S, single running stitch S that happens on the back, so this is a trim as well. You could also call this a graphic too. It's like cutting it one way or the other, but this is an identifier of our jeans. Then if you look at our main button, our main button is also logoed and it's got these abstracted wing designs with Staple on top, that goes for all of the button fly as well, it's a Staple positive social contagion. All of our exterior rivets also have Staple branding on them. So, again these are things that people walking down the street will never see, this is all for the owner, it's all for the owner to know. We always do one exterior pink rivet on everyone because the pigeons feet are pink, so that's our trademark color. So, this one gets the pigeon pink one. We also do them on the inside as well. So, on the inside, you'll see we've got pink rivets also. The other thing that we always do on all our pants, and this is our trademark, so this is a button fly here, on the inside placket of the fly, we embroider "Good luck" on the inside fly here. But the concept is, when a pigeon shits on you, they say It's good luck. So we're wishing you good luck in your pants. Everyone needs luck when they take their pants off. This is so tucked in here that I bet 80% of the users and owners of this jean don't even know what's ever there, it's maybe like three years after the fact that the light catches it in some way where they're like, "What does it say in here?", and it says, "Oh my God, this whole entire time, Staple has been wishing me good luck in my pants. That's awesome". So, we've got that. On the opposite side, so men if you're watching this and it's time to do a little twinkle, you take this off and then boom, you see a tonal pigeon embroidery on this side. So, just another little surprise that you might not notice till much later. Then on the inside, we'd like to have a lot of fun with our pocket bags, we have fun with pocket bags. So, on our pocket bags here, we actually do an embroidery stitch that says World Renown. So, it says World Renown, chain stitch embroidery on the pocket bag and then a logo hit as well over there with a pigeon, and then again all the inside rivets are pink. So, there's actually a lot of stuff going on here, it's actually grossly detailed out but it's all inside, it's all for the user. It's not for outside people, and it's just when you wear them, it's just a basic pair of black jeans, but there's a lot of little as we say tricks and do-thats going on. Literally, all of these things added together, when you factor in cost of goods, it's probably less than five bucks, but because of all of these tricks now, this warrants this guy to pay twice as much as you would for a pair of jeans at JCPenney or DICK'S or Kohl's because of all these tricks, and all of these tricks though connect back to our message, it connects back to the concept of the brand. So, again, I go back to concept and execution. What I just showed you was execution but we needed the story. You need to know that our logo's a pigeon, you need to know that the feet are pink, that's why the rivets are pink, you need to know that when a pigeon shits on you, this is what pigeon shit looks like. When that happens, it's good luck, and that's why it says good luck in the fly. So, all of these things are tied together. You can't just randomly throw words and symbols on a pair of jeans and expect it to be good execution, you got to have the story baked and then you could build execution to offer that story.
5. Hangtags: So, we've gone through main labels, the importance of that logo on your label, secondary label, tertiary labels. We've gone over trims. We've basically gone over everything that stays on your product. These are the things that are designed and baked into the product and for better for worse, it's very difficult for the customer to take off. So, these things live on your product forever, but there's also an ancillary equally important element. Which is the branding collateral items that potentially could come off your garments. These are things like hangtags, stickers, postcards. All these other things tchotchke items that can be attached to your garments at the point of sale, but it's essentially meant for the customer to have the ability to easily take them off. If you've ever bought anything from a company like Apple or Nike, how beautiful is that unboxing process, right? I mean there's YouTube videos of guys just unboxing things like pornography. So, there's something very beautiful about all the packaging elements and the ancillary branding items that just go with the package. Nine times out of 10, most of things will be thrown away actually, but you can think of it that way. That secondary to that the customer experiences the thing, takes it off, maybe keeps it, maybe throws that away. Those are lasting impressions that make you have fans for life basically. So, I'm going to go over some of the things that we do at Staple. Which just to give you some examples. The first thing I want to go through is our first original OG hangtags. I wanted to show these because I made these hangtags with my first 12-piece order of staple in 1997. I made them with no money and I made them by hand. Essentially, what I did was I wanted a hangtag that had a logo on it but also had a bit of the mission and the story of Staple. I thought the best way to do that was to find 20 different individuals that I really respected all throughout history and call meaningful quotes from these individuals. And I wanted to put those quotes and credit them on these hangtags and I want to 20 different hangtags. Then I would mix them all up and jumble them and I put them all on the garments so that depending on which size and color you got, it almost be like a fortune cookie. Where you got different quotes for each shirt that you bought. So, I wanted a little surprise like that. All I did was I bought craft paper at an art store and I printed the quote on there. And then on the other side, I printed the definition of the word Staple. Because I think a lot of people don't know why I called the company Staple. When they think of staple, they think of the piece of metal that holds paper together, but I was actually using the definition of staple meaning a chief item, part material, or element in anything. A raw material, the most important leading principal product in constant demand and that's what a staple is and that's why I named the company Staple. When I printed them out on craft paper, it was too flimsy because the paper was just literally like a piece of paper and I wanted it hard like this so it could stand the test of time. So, what I did was I then bought chipboard and chipboard is available at any art supply store. I took the paper that I printed out on my Epson inkjet color printer. Took the chipboard and I spray-mounted the paper onto the chipboard so that it added that rigidity that I wanted. Then I use an X-ACTO knife and I cut all of them out into little squares like this. Then I brought it to Kinko's and Kinko's little people would know has a drilling machine. And Kinko's we'll drill holes and stuff for you. So, I will just stack up a bunch of these squares and then I go to Kinko's and I'd say, "Okay, just drill in a half-inch a hole right through." And they could just do it in a second. It just goes right through. So, I've got my hang tag with my hole in it, and then I had a whole bunch of friends tie strings to the top of them. In the early days actually, I would use rubber bands. Because they were even faster. Then you just have a little safety pin and boom, there's your little hang tag. Now, back in the day, that's very time consuming, but it was super cheap and I was able to do it on the cheap like that for awhile. And now we get these produced, but just goes to show that all you need is imagination. All you need is creativity and thought and care to make a great hangtag. You don't need a lot of money. So, there's really no excuse why any branch shouldn't have a hangtag. Again, the reason why you have a hangtag is to tell that story. Tell that mission statement, literally define. I literally define what staple was to people and think about it. If a guy picks up a Staple shirt back then and he just like cool shirt, I'll wear it. I don't know what brand it is. I don't care what brand it is. That's no good. I want the guy to be like, "Yo, this brand is Staple and they named it Staple because of this that," and the third and that becomes a brand ambassador immediately. So, these were inherently very valuable in the progression of the brand. Not in a way that an accountant could tell you that like "Yes, these were very valuable. You had a great click-through rate on these." Like no, I don't know what the click-through rate on this was. These could've been thrown away. These could have been-- I know some people kept these and attached them to their backpacks and stuff. So, it's hard to actually define what the value of these were, but I know they went a super long way. So, this is how we started it at Staple with these little cardboard hangtags. As we progressed, we got into more fun. I did an entire collection once that was based off of a nautical yachting theme. So, then I changed up the hangtags and made it into these little floaty key chains. Where you put your keys on it and then if you drop your keys in the water, they don't sink. They float up like that. So, we did these custom printed. They say Staple, and then on the back they say New York state of mind. So, that was pretty another cool little tchotchke and these I know people kept. People kept these like crazy. Because they're also like they act as stress relievers too. So, you could squeeze them like stress relievers. So, that's cool. We didn't have a manufacturer for these or we don't know who makes these things. We just googled key chain floaties. And there's these promotional companies out there that will just put your logo on anything. Anything from Swiss army knives to these things, to lighters, whatever and that's what we did. We got them made at a promotional company, but there's some real genius and creativity in that because the promo company makes these for people who own boats and people want to put their boat logo and stuff on there. They can't imagine that somebody would be putting it on street wear clothing. So, it's really this ability to appropriate from outside of the market, outside of the industry and then put it in your industry. And to our industry, like kids who by Staple, they've never seen this or use it in that application. So, it's so fresh to them. And probably the king of all this is Supreme. If you've ever seen like Supreme lighters, Supreme nun chucks, Supreme hammers, Supreme toolbox, Supreme thermos. These are all things that promo companies will do. They'll just put your logo and stuff, but the way Supreme does it is in such a way that is so well branded, so consistent that they add this high level of covetousness to these very everyday normal mundane items. And it's really like a sociological art project almost like. I feel like the owners of Supreme or like let's see what ridiculous thing we could put our logo on to see if people will still buy it and they always do. It's amazing. So, that's one of the tchotchkes. We also make pins, these pigeon pins. Is really easy to make a pin. Just Google pin maker and you will see half a dozen companies that make pins like this. All different styles and again, these costs like a buck or less and the cool thing about these is that you could attach them to your clothes. So, it's like a nice added items to the clothing, but people will always take them off and put them on their other clothing. So, they could be wearing like a blank Levi's shirt or Uniqlo shirt and put a Staple pin on it and to the general public, that's a Staple shirt now. So, that's really cool. And the other thing that's really cool about making stuff like this, is that you could actually sell this now as an additional item in your collection. So, we sell pins. We also put them on our clothes, but you could buy like a five pack of these also. So, these actually become a revenue stream, too. So, pin's another great idea. Again, these are just all stuff that we've done. I'm just giving you fodder and ingredients for ideas, but you guys take this idea and now run with it and do whatever you want. So, here's another. We did a collaboration bag with Porter, it's a Japanese bag company. And for them, we made this rubberized hangtag. I've got another one here. We made this rubberized hangtag where you could write your information on the back. Because it is a travel piece so you want to write your information to retrieve yourself on it. I was actually pretty stupid with this. I remember because in order to make a rubberized tag like this, these are high minimums. I think it was 5,000 pieces minimum to make this. So, I had to make 5,000 of these things. Unfortunately, we only made 500 of these bags. So, I knew right off the bat, that I'd be stuck with 4,500 of these things, but I just made them anyway because first of all, we were able to actually sell these for like 10 bucks a pop afterwards. So, we started selling them individually. Because they bear the Head Porter logo as well as the Reed Space logo on them. But we saw people taking these off of these bags and putting them onto other bags. So, it was so cool to see people re-branding their generic bags as Porter Reed Space bags. So, that was pretty cool, but this is another example of a cool branding collateral item. So, there's a couple of examples. Hangtags, floaties, promotional items, pins, rubberized. You could do different techniques and materials with your tags as well. On denim, if you're doing pants, this is another big one. The great thing about pants is you have this huge real estate to play with, right? So, why not put a big old sign on it just to tell the full story of what your brand is about. So, we've got this thick cardboard one that pops off really easily. You've seen this on Levi's as well. It's nothing new, but again, this adds not even $0.05 to the cost of your goods and look at this billboard that you have on a store shelf now. Who wouldn't want this versus just blank? You know I mean? So, for $0.05, I'll take that as a billboard. So, this is a great branding element as well. Really good usage of real estate.
6. Stickers: So, another really important branding item that staple has used to its advantage in the past has been stickers. I'm always amazed at the power of the sticker. I mean, when I was a kid I used to put stickers all over my book covers, all over my trapper keeper, and apparently decades later kids still use stickers, and they still put stickers up everywhere and now they put them up on street light posts, street walls, everything everywhere. It's been so important to us because a lot of people I think are not in a position to drop $30 or $50 on a shirt, but they still love your brand, and a sticker is a great way for them to still represent your brand. Putting a staple sticker on their laptop, they didn't have to spend anything and they could still represent that they're down with your brand. So, that's so important because fans are not always just about people who give you money they're just about ambassadors telling the story, spreading the word of your company, because they might tell somebody that might spend $500 on your brand. So, stickering, super important from day one, and I've learned a lot of lessons about stickers about what makes a good sticker and what makes a bad sticker. There's a lot of ins and outs for this. So, there's a couple of different types of stickers, there's your basic shape sticker which is like usually a square rectangle or circle, and then you could do a die cut sticker so it's custom cut to whatever shape you want. So you could do it, in our case it's a pigeon, or you could do it as a piece of shit. So, we have pigeon poop stickers as well, which are great when you stick them on your car window or laptop or phone people think a bird shot on your car. So stickers are great, and if stickers are really good like a sticker on a hat for instance, you've probably seen a lot of young people keep the sticker on their hat. So sometimes even a simple sticker could last through people throwing it away, or people trashing it and they want to keep it. It's almost like a sign of authenticity. So, never underestimate the power of a sticker. So, we do stickers in all sorts of sizes. Another thing to consider is when you do stickers, where you intend the surface to be, right? So, different types of snickering adhesives work better on some surfaces and not so good on other surfaces, so some work really great on glass, and the ones that work great on glass suck on concrete walls and vice versa. So, you want to know where your customer is going to most likely put a sticker up, and you also want to know in terms of size and scale. We made this big whole pigeon's sticker and it's great for like laptops, like 15 inch laptops. But hey, I want to put a sticker on my phone, well this no longer really works for that right? So then that's why you make a little sticker like this it's great for cell phone devices. I mean, we literally have three different sizes of pigeon poop stickers for different applications. I mean, it sounds maniacal like really you're going to make three sizes of pigeon shit? But yeah, because some people want to put it on their book covers, some people want to put on their cell phones, some people want to put on their iPad, so, we're going to make one for each of them. Honestly in terms of making stickers, it's always a challenge because, I kind of feel like sticker manufacturers come and go all the time, so we always search google for sticker manufacturers, but to be honest 18 years into the game I still do not have a go-to sticker manufacturer. Every time I make a sticker run I have to call or Google a new manufacturer, because I'm never really happy with my previous run. Like for example, this one, this sticker here, you know what really bothers me about this sticker? It bothers me that there is a half point hair line of white around this pigeon. I want the blue to go all the way to the edge. I don't want this little white hairline here, and that really bothers me and it's not on the art. It's that the way they made the sticker required it so that it had to have that hairline, and so now I won't use these guys again. I'm going to try to find another guy, but, there's a lot of different manufacturers out there I think every state in America now has a dozen sticker manufacturers in each state. So, it really comes down to pricing, die cutting is the other thing, not everybody can do a die cut, and then the type of adhesive you want to use as well. It's honestly like I think you should use our pigeon logo or even the supreme logo as an example of how it's not honestly about the logo, don't kill yourself over is the art right? Is the graphic right? The supreme logo is a red box with white font in it its for sure, italicized extra bold if you'd like to go make one yourself. It's not about that. That's not the genius of the supreme campaign, the genius of the supreme campaign is the consistency, and the constant bringing our great product, great authenticity, great concepts, and that being the flag of it all. And that's what makes that logo great. It's not that the logo itself is great, it's not that the pigeon is great, it's what the pigeon represents to everybody is what makes this great. Anybody can put a bird and make a sticker on it, go ahead, make a crow, make a robin tomorrow, but it won't be what staple means today, in time it will, but you got to work towards that, you got to work towards building your brand that way.
7. Creative Packaging: So, now that we've gone over some of the auxiliary elements that go into your product, we're talking about the things that a customer may or may not take off, but they're not part of your garment or your product. Now, let's talk about after you've got that entire kit on your entire product maybe it's a shirt, you've got all of the trims, labels, tertiary labels, you've got all of the auxiliary branding elements that are all attached to that, you've got your whole product. It's a beautiful thing, you have got the entire thing done. Now you have got to put it inside of something in order to get it to the store and that's called the package. So, let's talk about packaging design now. At staple, as an example, you know a lot of the retailers that we work with, I would say 9.9 out of 10 of the retailers that we work with, will take the packaging that you put your product in, and rip it out of the packaging and throw it away and then just put your product on the shelf, right, that's how most stores would do it. They're not going to put it on the shelf in its package, because that makes the selling of it really hard. Nobody can see what it is or feel what it is, so they don't want to leave it in the package and want to take it out of the package, and quite honestly I don't really need to impress the stock holder that is putting the product on the shelf, so I don't need to make an unboxing process for that guy, he just is unboxing the thing and putting it on the shelf. So, we don't put a lot of investment oftentimes into our packaging, typically what we'll do is a basic poly bag. This plastic bag is called a poly bag, with just our logo really big on it and it's really just meant as an ID, it's an identifier, it just says that, ''Hey dude in the shipping department, this is the Staple shirt, make sure it goes in the right department. '' Then of course on the back you got to put all the things where, you can't give this to your kid as a toy, because that always happens. People give poly bags to kids as toys. But yeah, basically this is what we do. Poly bag, big logo on it. You rip it out, this is what the guy will do, he'll just take it out and then will just do this, take all those protective tissue out and will just put it on the shelf like that. That's usually what happens and this stuff gets thrown away. So, whether you invested a penny into this or $5 into this, this is what basically happens to that thing. So, that's why we basically keep packaging simple. But sometimes we do some special items, we do limited edition releases, we do short runs, we do collaborations and when we do these, we want to commemorate them with some dope packaging, because people collect these things and when you collect it, you want to keep it in the package that it's being collected in. So, as an example, we did a collaboration with kidrobot, which is one of the premier toy makers in the world, and we actually ended up making this guy right here, who's very rare. It's the pigeon who mated with the Michelin Man and we did a Michelin pigeon, like that and on the bottom of the feet it says "Staple kidrobot" there. So, we did that and so this is a pretty special thing. So, we decided to make this custom box for it, that's got all branding, all throughout, we've got the guy on it, there's two colors that it came in, it's got a big cartoons, splat of pigeon poop on the top. It's got the logos on the bottom, everything's there, Staple, website, our motto, kidrobot, their website designed with love, white version limited edition, original version all the information is right here for you. It's all in a beautiful box that you can keep on a shelf like I do. So, this is one example of a great packaging item. Then another one, is that a lot of you guys might be familiar with if you own a pair of Beats by Dre, is we did a pair of pigeon Beats by Dre. They were kind enough to allow us to customize on the packaging as well, and actually do the pigeon logo right on the front, front and center like that, so that's pretty awesome. Then as you know, the unboxing of beats items are really beautiful, I mean like take the sleeve off and then you've got a little pull tab magnetic closure like that, and then all of that comes out, and then this comes in it's own another case, and then this unwraps, and then boom you've got that. So, that's quite a beautiful unboxing crosses that they've got, which is probably why they're owned by Apple now. So, those are two really good examples of product packaging for limited edition items. I want to show you another one that is one of my favorites of all time. This is a t-shirt packaging item, and it's actually in the shape of a magazine as you can see, and it's a company called T post that we collaborated with. T post always makes t-shirts in this shape of a magazine, so all in all it looks like a magazine, but when you open it up, it's got an article in it and it's got a t-shirt, so it's all included in this package they interviewed me, they had me design this shirt, and what's really cool is that when you unwrap the tee, so here's the t-shirt, it's got our design on it or even they threw sticker in there, look at that. They listened to me, they took my class. They've got the design on the front, but then on the inside of the shirt, so if you take this shirt now and flip it inside out, they put the whole article on the inside of the t-shirt. So, they've literally merged a magazine and a t-shirt together into this beautiful package, and this is a major collector item. I mean it's two for one, and just the way it's all held together, they have their main labels here, printed on. They've got their secondary label here on the sleeve. So this brand T-Post is following all the right directions and tips on how to do really dope product design, and then again it all folds up, comes back in, and then you just bind it into this pigeon pink rubbery elastic band here that we did, and then close this up and then you just file that onto your bookshelf. That's some really cool package design. So, get inspired, you have got special boxes, printed boxes, you have got a magazine, you have got simple poly bags, you could do all sorts of different things with packaging and this is really like the gift wrapping on your product.
8. Conclusion: So, altogether now, you have the entire brand collateral landscape. Now, this might sound really like granular and really detailed and really nerdy, but these are the things that really matter. Like I said before, these are the things that separate you from the competition. It's what tells your story. It is the way that you can allow yourself to really tell the whole public what your whole mission is, what your whole spirit and guideline is all about. This is where you can really tell it. Not so much in the product, actually, but more so in these branding collateral items. So, what I want to see from you is your best original ideas on how to tell the story. Obviously, I want to see your story first, but I also want to see how you're going to tell it. You could do mock-ups. You could do renderings. You could actually cut stuff out like I did with my first hang tag. So, I want to see your most original ideas, put them up on the Skillshare platform, and I can't wait to see all the submissions.
Jeff Staple, Founder, Staple Design
