This Is Not A Brand

This is not a brand, it is a project. To be absolutely accurate it is a few projects grouped together here. We thought about saying it is an art project but that doesn’t sound quite right.  It is a design project without all the trappings of brands, branding and brandamania. And for the most part our collaborators are artists.

Why is it not a brand? Got something against brands?

Yeah, sort of.

What would that be?

Well, you know, the language of marketing seems to dominate our lives. Talking to people down at the local enterprise support office they said well you need to develop your brand. Oh really? Oh no! Reading the papers and seeing all that brand stuff, branding in the magazines, corporations worried about how to brand online, how to extend the brand onto websites, how to extend the brand to social networks.

The world as we know it is determined by the expenditure of brands. Our culture is brand-driven.

So we wondered what happens when you decide to opt out of brands and re-embrace people and relationships?

We’re not anti-brand but we are neutral. We wanted to make a line of products that establish a relationship between buyers and designers. The first such product is Jon Coffelt’s duct-tape One World Wallet. Buy one and you can join Jon’s community on Ning. You can share the story of life with your new wallet in the community and at any time you can send Jon the wallet and he’ll make new art works out of it incorporating your story.

We have some more projects we’re dreaming up. Please become a part of our non-branded world.