How to Be One of the Cool Kids.

Design > Trade Show Booth

This booth! Hahaha. The Stuf brand was snooty as all get out. It was acting like a spoiled, high-end art studio and its big debut in its own show booth had to be amazing. I love planning out trade show booths. I mean, I hate it and love it. My process is ridiculous, so you’ll see why. I’m sort of a control freak. And, I’m not very spacial. Like, I can’t really tell, just off the top of my head, how to fill a 10’ x 10’ space with displays and furniture and chairs without it being all crowded and shitty. I need to cheat to find that out.

The Stuf booth had to be amazing, sure. But the brand was so clean, and white, and simple that it couldn’t be a circus (even though that was one of the Stuf families). Definitely, the figures needed to stand out. I started with some booth sketches and ended up with an idea of what I wanted to do. Then I moved onto Illustrator to create a floor plan to 1/4 scale. Then I’d do wall plans to scale. Then, yep, I print them out and build a small 1/4 model of the booth, complete with tiny hand-build shelving and furniture. I know what you’re thinking and, yes, I’m a total freak. But wait. There’s more. I populate it with little people to scale and then shoot it, so I can see what it’s like to be IN THE TINY BOOTH.

FINAL: For Stuf’s premier booth at NYIGF, I wanted to build a world a booth that would blow people away while not overshadowing the product. Entering the cloud-world of Stuf, you’re treated to a museum-like experience.

BEFORE: Can you believe this is what our space was when we got there? The design section had wood walls instead of the pipe-and-drape you’d get in less fancy parts of the show. I knew we’d have stable walls before I started designing for it and it’s the only way we could have done what we did.

COMPS: An early sketch that I took to Adobe Illustrator to work out. It didn’t work out. It’d have been cool, but I didn’t think anyone would want to come into the booth through such a narrow entrance. Especially the top part. But the idea of a semi-enclosed space was interesting. So I scaled everything back to end up with the clouds. Because they were all white and the booth was white, I thought they’d be less intimidating. They’d become sort of visible but invisible. To test it out, I’d have to make a scale model because I’m weird like that. Also, I love that tie.

COMPS: Proof positive. My model really helped me understand the space, figure out how I’d attach the clouds to the walls, and managed my expectations. Then I could get down to speccing out the details to give to the guys I hired to make the clouds for me. They had to be light (and on the cheap) so I ended having them cut out of thin sheets of PVC. Then they’d just bend ‘em where I needed a tab to screw them in.

FINAL: A look at our hardcover application to get into the snooty design section of the show. That’s a picture of my model in the book. I hadn’t made the booth yet, but wanted to convince them it was real, it was cool, and it was ready to bring to NY. Kelly’s standing outside the Stuf booth just as we started setting it up. And finally here’s my model shot again along side the real deal. Expectations managed! Hahahaha. It kind of creeps me out how similar they are, but that’s says a lot about thinking shit through. Or about how much I hate surprises.

The best part of this was the clouds. The front of the booth would be framed in clouds, as if they were parting to let you in. Directly behind the clouds, a bright white booth where the only color was the color of the Stuf dolls. It made a HUGE impact. The trick with bringing Stuf to trade shows wasn’t the booth, though. It was getting in at all. Because Stuf belonged in the Design category, and that category is as snooty as the fake art brand we’d created. The design sections of trade shows are juried. You have to submit pictures of your booth and your brand and your products, and then they decide if you’re one of the cool kids or not. And of course Stuf didn’t actually have the booth ready to go yet (I wasn’t going to pay to manufacture it, if I wasn’t going to get in). So that’s where making a scale model maybe wasn’t such a crazy thing to do after all?

We made a hardcover book of the Stuf brand, and we sent that as our application! Yeah, INSTEAD of the actual application. Who does that?! Of course we got in because of it. I’ve written about what a disaster our first shipment of Stuf dolls turned out to be, and this booth was sort of a similar tale. As simple as we designed it, it took FOREVER to set up. We thought it might take a few hours – screw in a bunch of shelves, screw in the clouds, rub down some type, how hard can it be? It took us 7 hours to set up. And when you believe it’ll take 3, but instead it takes 7, it’s mental torment. But the final product was worth it. 

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Be a Whole Bunch of Different Illustrators.

Illustration > Stuf

OMG this was fun. But how can illustrating art toys, not be? I’ve written about how this brand was created (and why), and you can see how Stuf’s design process went. From an illustrative standpoint, I wanted to try some things I’d never done before: like try out a really minimalist modern style; or experiment with different materials. The idea was to make each Stuf theme seem like it was from a different artist, but what you see here is all me. :-)

ILLUSTRATION: Some of the concepts I drew up for the plush project, Stuf. All based on real birds and darned if I can remember who that cute fella in the bottom middle is. Anyhoo, the idea with Bird Stuf was that it’d be super modern in the style of Charley Harper.

ILLUSTRATION: Circus Stuf was probably the most challenging and the most fun because of it. I really wish I did the acrobat. I threw the Ringmaster doll photo in so you can see how the flat illustrations translate to the Stuf dolls. And below is a fake Photoshop job I did to test a two color version of the Big Stuf Elephant.

ILLUSTRATION: The march to the final Big Stuf Robot. I didn’t think anyone would remember punch cards. So sad. Hahaha.

ILLUSTRATION: This was a round I considered for International Stuf. With, of course, each figure representing a country. I couldn’t help but think of Mary Blair when doing these.

ILLUSTRATION: Pirate Stuf was entirely different from all that other mod stuff. It begged to be rough and sea-faring. And the back of each was an hilarious character trait. The guy with the mutton chops is Curly Pete and he was the only one “who knows where the treasure’s hid”.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How a Simple Plan Can Go So Wrong, and So Right.

Design > Product

I know I say this a lot, but making things is hard. There are lots of moving parts to get right, no matter what it is. If you’re a small business, you’re likely struggling to bring it in for a manufacturing cost you can afford, and with a retail price your customer can afford. Not to mention, I’ve had a lot of things come from the factory damaged (it happens) which is a double whammy because you have lost capital plus lost sales opportunity. Because of that, I’m always looking for a way to make things that would eliminate the likelihood of disaster, or to roll with it (like Mysterio did).

I decided on a plush project. It would be one form factor; two different sizes. It would have a flat front, a flat continuous side panel, and a flat back. It’d be made of canvas, filled with fluff and a layer of beans at the bottom so the doll would stand on its own. Easy, right? The fun part would be designing characters on this plush blank canvas. I’ve always been a big fan of art toys. Take Frank Kosik’s Labbit series or the Dunny characters, for example. So smart and simple, and endlessly fun. I’d call my art plush project, Stuf.

FINAL: This is the plush line I created called Stuf. Simple dolls with bean bases (so they stand on their own). Art toys that kids could use as playthings, puppets, or pals. Simple, clean, bright, and fun.

EARLY: I hit on the shape I wanted for all the Stuf dolls to share and here’s a little peek at some of the sketch work. I made paper models (complete with fill) to see if they had the physical presenceI wanted them to have. Yeah, I’m weird that way. I started off thinking I just wanted to make really graphic little characters, but it soon grew to all kinds o possibilities.

EARLY: OMFG. I designed the simplest thing ever so I’d avoid any production disasters. What I got was the exact opposite. Look, I’m good at specing out product for factories (US and overseas).. I was thorough with the instructions for what I wanted (lower right corner). But if it could go wrong it did. The shape, fabric, color, structure…UGH. With my detailed instructions I even included the paper doll shot from above. They assumed I wanted puffy faces sewn on. < sigh >

I didn’t have a lot of money to invest in Stuf. And this plush wasn’t even something that fit with everything else I was designing for Wrybaby. So it was a creative experiment, for sure. I had to begin by getting manufacturing costs, and then from there, work out what I could do. For example, I’d initially wanted to make every doll different. Just create a lot of fun art pieces that would live under a brand story. Once the costs came in, Kelly and I figured we’d be better off creating a handful of Stuf “families” instead. That way each family could be a story, and the likelihood of success was higher overall. Why? Because if I created, say, 20 of one-off Stuf characters, what if people LOVED three and they sold out? I’d be stuck with 17 slow sellers and no way of re-investing in the three that worked. Get it? If you group families, there’s an incentive for people to buy multiple pieces in a family they’re drawn to. I’ll come back to this later.

Anyhoo, it worked out that we’d make 4 Stuf families. Each made up of 4 small dolls and one big Stuf doll. You should see all the preliminary sketches I did (so many!). It was a blast, but I really wanted to make them all. The two deciding factors for the themes we went with were: current trends; and our instinct for what we knew would be attractive to Wrybaby’s wholesale clients. Pirate Stuf, Bird Stuf, and Robot Stuf were an easy leap for stores. We went with Developmental Stuf because it was a link to Wrybaby’s parenting wheelhouse. Think of it as a safety move. If the others didn’t work, at least there was a solid baby offering.

FINAL: A closer look at Pirate Stuf. I gave each pirate his (or her) own little character attributes for kids to build on. A parent once called me to say her son, who’s afraid of the water, found great comfort in his Shaggy Dan. Honestly, that alone made all the Stuf headaches worth it to me. Oh, and Pirate Sue really IS nothin’ but trouble! Hahaha

FINAL: Some Stuf dolls shared pattern on the back, but had extra credit on the side panels, like Circus and Robot Stuf. I especially like how the rosy=cheeked lion sits on a little performance pedestal.

FINAL: We pulled everything along with Stuf’s clean “European art toy” aesthetic through to it’s website and retail packaging. We made plaques for each Stuf family that made them look so special on retail shelving. And later we’d even build wood and canvas backdrops for each Stuf family.

FINAL: Yep! I made Stuf backpacks! The funnest part was the side water bottle pockets. The Owl’s pocket said SEEDS, and the Circus Elephant’s pocket said…wait for it…PEANUTS! Of course. :-)

We’d thought of every little thing except one. That the factory would fuck us. Oh boy, did they ever. We were working with a liason in the states who touted Gap experience and pull with a factory who was rich with Disney experience. As simple as this project was, it was a complete shock when the complete Stuf shipment arrived and only 25% of it could be sold. Yeah. While the samples they sent for approval were great, the final dolls were misprinted, sewn terribly, and…grimy. It looked like they ran the fabric over with a greasy forklift before sewing them. Not to ruin the story, but it’s important to expect the best and plan for the worst. No matter how much you try to avoid trouble, it’s inevitable in one way or another. 

But as they say, the show must go on. We had to really make sure our sellable 25% s-o-l-d. So we kept to our plan and did something you’d think we would have rethought considering the circumstances. I’ve written about how we built a snooty art brand for Stuf to live under. It was like a high-end art gallery that was only open by appointment and never answered the phone or returned calls. Hilarious and, as it turned out, hilariously effective. Stuf would soon be sold in major art museums across the country from SF MOMA to NY MOMA (you can see the complete list here).

Stuf sold through that first terrible shipment and we were able to find a new factory to make a disaster-free second round. Encouraged by Stuf’s success, we designed Stuf backpacks and we added hand-made wood and canvas backdrops for playtime with each Stuf family. OMG, the trade show booth that I designed for Stuf is still one of the best booths I’ve ever done. But that’s a whole other story.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Break Into Modern Art Museums.

Strategy > Product Development

I’d designed and manufactured all kinds of products – baby clothing, children’s hooded towels, toys, stacking blocks, board books, even pacifier cases. OMG it was all so HARD. I had always wanted to make a line of plush (normal people call them stuffed animals), but was intimidated by the potential for it to go wrong. Hahaha. I’m such a chicken, but being gun-shy DID bring me success in our Mysterio line. So, I put that kind of thinking against the plush problem.

First of all, and if you know me you already know this, it couldn’t be like any plush. I didn’t want to make furry lions, or sweet teddy bears out of recycled sweaters. It had to be different. I was super intrigued by blind box art toys. Especially the artists who were sculpting one simple form, and then re-skinning that form in different ways. It seemed so simple and yet so endless what you could do within those confines. So I started noodling forms and experimenting with what could be done with them.

Where I ended up was certainly really different. Canvas forms filled with beans at the base so they stood on their own. Easy surface to print on, simple shape to sew. Manufacturing would be easy since I’d only be held to a printing minimum rather than a per piece construction minimum. I could make a lot of different dolls without a lot of expense. But it wasn’t “fluffy expected” and it wasn’t particularly “baby”. I didn’t think it mattered. I was going for something beyond expectation.

FINAL: This is Robot Stuf. Because we were funding this line ourselves we had to do it as economically as possible. Can you guess one of our methods? Right. Limited colors on each doll (notice the ON switch on the back isn’t green). But it made it a challenge. So what do you do when you’re limited on colors? Double down and make it work to distinguish each dolls individuality and character.

FINAL: All along It was always this simple. The form on the left was Big Stuf, 12” tall. On the right, Small Stuf, 6” tall. These were the blank factory samples we approved.

FINAL: While some Stuf families had the same patterns on the back of each doll (Robot Stuf all had ON and OFF buttons, Circus Stuf all had a shared graphic pattern), Pirate Stuf all had a bit about each pirate’s personality on the back. My favorite, I think, was the orange Shaggy Dan who was “only a little afraid of the water”.

FINAL: Circus Stuf was probably my favorite family and it was an honor to have them for sale at the Ringling (as in Ringling Brothers) Museum of Art Florida. Pictured with the Circus Stuf family is the Big Top-themed wood and canvas backdrop I later added to the line.

FINAL: Bird Stuf and Developmental Stuf.

I always tell my clients that they need to design their audience before they design their product. I knew I wanted this line to appeal to art-types, and that because of it’s plush category nature, they’d likely be parents. So why not make collectible art plush for children? And that’s when I started working on themes. I went EVERYWHERE and it was SO fun. I eventually landed on five different sets – Circus, Bird, Robot, Pirate, and Developmental. Developmental Stuf was interesting because developmental research shows that babies respond positively to high contrast items. It stimulates their brains like crazy (in a good way).

Side note: No matter how simple you try to make things, it always gets complicated. We had hired a freelance production manager who’d worked for the likes of the Gap and we found a factory who’d manufactured for Disney, yet 75% of our container shipment arrived practically destroyed. Badly sewn, misprinted, stained and unsellable. The 25% we could use was exactly to specification, thank goodness. Entrepreneurs, know this: no matter how much you try to prevent this situation, it’s ALWAYS a possibility. Which ALWAYS sucks. 

I’d always planned to market Stuf in a special way. Like, exclusive special. So I developed a line presentation that would set it up to be museum quality from the beginning. Even the name, Stuf, gave a simplistic European flavor without the fancy umlauts. Each line of Stuf would be a limited series, and a percentage of proceeds would be donated to a specific charity related to each theme. Bird Stuf, for example, would donate to the American Bird Conservatory. Developmental Stuf would contribute to Plan. The idea was for stores to display each line of Stuf alongside an engraved plaque we had made with the charity information. When a customer brought a Stuf doll to the register, the shopkeep would retrieve a fresh product from the back for purchase. It was special art you could buy. And this is an important part of the strategy – perceived value. We set this up to look like each piece (with its charitable contributions and lack of back stock) would retail for $40 each. No. Each of the small dolls retailed for just $12.95. The big ones for just $24.95.

FINAL: Our online retail packaging was clean, simple and graphic, like the brand.

FINAL: Developmental Stuf in NY MOMA.

Finally I get to the REAL strategy part. We didn’t cop to being the creators of Stuf. We were just the DISTRIBUTERS. We never told our stores or any interested parties where Stuf came from. And this is important to building mystique. We build a whole separate website for Stuf and only offered a single Stuf email as contact info. No order forms. No list of stores that we sold to. No wholesale reps to contact to buy it. Nothing. This all lived in the background before we launched at the big NY International Gift Fair.

When Wrybaby did bring it to market, we played dumb. We found this line and we’re the distributors. It was so different from anything else in the Wrybaby booth, it was totally plausible. And we gave it wide berth to attract stores we’d never been in before. Those store were museum stores. Modern art museums. And we got their attention. Before too long Stuf was available in:

MOMA NY
MOMA SF
Contemporary Arts Center - Cinncinati
Walker Art Center - Minneapolis
The Art Gallery of new South Wales
Arkansas Arts Center
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Delaware Art Museum
Portland Art Museum
Tacoma Art Museum
Dallas Museum of Art
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Ringling Museum of Art Florida
The Getty Museum
The Ackland Museum NC
The Autry Museum
The Bremam Museum
Bay Area Discovery Museum

FINAL: Once the concept proved itself, Stuf got to have it’s own booth at NYIGF. So clean! I wish I had a better camera to document it. :-P

But here’s the best part. Museums liked Stuf, but we pulled the whole third-party distributorship act through to the end. Emails to the Stuf website went unanswered, or a Stuf Staffer replied vaguely. There was no phone number to call. It was like those Stuf people weren’t really interested in selling their plush dolls at all. Stuf’s website was hilariously smug. It was set up like a modern art gallery site. It only listed the products, the museums they were in (which expanded by the week), the charities it funded, and the trade shows it would be presented at. I’ll tell you, I sat on the one museums PO for months until they were calling me every day to fill our their new vendor form and ship them. Why? Sometimes the more you make people want something and the more they have to work for it, the more valuable it becomes to them. It’s the law of exclusivity. Availability works the same way.

Stuf was successful enough to warrant an INCREDIBLE trade show booth dedicated to it. Very artsy. We added cool canvas backdrops to the product line so kids could put on plays using characters from each Stuf theme. Stuf went through another reorder with another factory (much better) and we retired the line to focus on other projects. But I’ve still have the bragging rights to having my art featured in most of America’s major art museums (even if it was in the gift shops).

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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