Corporate creative design agency Moving Brands has just launched its own range of clothing, utilising a quite unique design philosophy. The first product was unveiled, along with the technology which gave birth to it, at an event in their Old Street headquarters last Wednesday. We popped along to check out what all the fuss was about, and acquaint ourselves with the new fashion brand, known simply as Weare.
Now, user-generated content is nothing new, right? However, with this in mind, there is a distinct difference between encouraging YouTube junkies to submit videos to a one-off microsite for a particular campaign, and placing the very type, design and realisation of your product, entirely in the hands of the consumer. This is exactly what Weare has begun to do, in what they are calling 'co-creation'.
During the Christmas period, the Moving Brands 'ecosystem of friends, colleagues and clients' could log on to a website and draw their own pixelated message via a web interface, which was then streamed directly to a display in the Moving Brands window. The response to this initiative was so overwhelming, that they decided to compile this same sequence of images and print them onto a scarf which then became the first Weare product. Moving Brands founder Ben Wolstenholme comments on the conception of his new fashion brand:
'Many people want to be involved in what they wear, and the creation of the world around them...Weare is the world’s first label that allows them to do that... it’s a horrible term, but one way to think about this is Fashion 2.0. It’s an attitude not just a technology.'
ndeed one brand that has made a success of user-generated design is US-based Threadless - their original t-shirt designs submitted and voted for by customers are proving to be a massive hit. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for a full Birth of a Brand feature in the upcoming Contagious issue 14 for more on these guys...
The 2008 Weare website is about to go live and start accepting a whole new series of scribbles, smilies and words for the design of its next product, to be shown at an exhibition in November. We even made our contribution at the launch event - we won't go into the details, but suffice to say that a dot matrix approximation of a palm tree can appear distinctly more phallic than arboreal if you're not careful. Just as well it was streamed directly to a giant flat screen monitor on the wall then...
http://weare.movingbrands.com/
This is without doubt, an interesting exercise, raising questions such as, why hasn’t another fashion label tried co-created design, and why hasn’t another branding agency tried their hand at creating a fashion label? We hate to sound cynical, but eleven months is quite a wait in between individual products, and once the new one arrives, will the design look exactly the same as the scarf, only on a set of pyjamas, or a T-shirt? If this is the case, then perhaps this answers both questions...
However, here at Contagious, we like to give people the benefit of the doubt and in fact, we quite like the scarf. After all, maybe, just maybe Moving Brands are offering a pixelated glimpse into the future of how brands will become completely transparent and dependent on consumer interaction - now that, we think you’ll agree, might be worth the wait...
