The curiosity shop of recycled ideas

“Did they like my idea?” This is almost always the question I get from one of the team when I return from a pitch. They want to feel like a winner and make those late night thoughts really count. They want to tell their family how they game changed and to look out for shares on Facebook, soon.

Of course, the odds are stacked against them. We have hedged our bets and put forward several, different ideas to give us a fighting chance; including one wild card idea and one safe bet. With all of them ticking as many of the client’s boxes as we possibly can. With photo-realistic images to visualise the idea and copy packed with neuro-programmed language to give it our best shot. Chances are that their idea didn’t make it for one of 100 reasons from stakeholder management, nerves, budget or it was just a bad day.

It doesn’t really help that as a business we have developed our own logic and process to come up with lots and lots of ideas, really quickly and regularly overdose on mad and sideways thoughts. Filling up our heads with impossibles and distractions. Expanding your headspace to think about lots of different things and to connect them to create lots of possibilities is the exact opposite of trendy mindfulness but is the way we roll. It’s also fun and makes your heart beat.

Anyway, I hate to see that look in their eyes when they hear that we won’t be going ahead with the idea. It’s not good when ideas evaporate and go unused. As with all agencies, we try and see if we can adapt them for different challenges and that sometimes works. We have gone a step further, we like to experiment and we love to make stuff together, we have our own art studio for this very reason. Call it team bonding or call it a wonky pursuit of really seeing things through, it’s a trait I like to develop and encourage in the team.

We decided to take the ideas that are rejected or not even put forward and turn them into products (unrelated to the prospect or opportunity they were intended) that we can use our self, sell or give away. We would like to sell them, of course, we hustle like that. We think the personal story of how that product came to be, it’s source of life and DNA is interesting and we think it’s unique and different. This is what has given life to our very own curiosity shop, where all the items are made from the off cuts of a rejected idea we once had. Initially our shop can be found on http://etsy.me/1T42cDu on ETSY. We would love it if you were curious about our first product.

Our first product is a pillow that we have screen printed with a technology feather design (it doesn’t do anything like sync to your iPhone, its just a pillow with a pattern. Old school, you know!). We developed this design to communicate the soft and gentle way that technology can assist us to be better for something different, something intangible and it’s ended up here as a real world pillow. To bring the real and digital together we have called this product ‘REST’. You have to love your API’s to get why we have called it that and and we hope that you do get it.

We hope that you are curious.