60 Minutes. 30 Merch Ideas. 1 Solid Insight.

(Undertaken as Creative Director at Sane Difference)

One afternoon, over chai, the founder of Sane Difference and I sat down to brainstorm merchandise ideas for ThePrint Store.

The brief was simple enough to come up with a few concepts.

An hour later, we had around thirty.

Thirty bloody good ideas that we were proud of. Which was unusual. Most creative projects involve spending weeks trying to find one idea everyone agrees on. This felt different. Ideas arrived faster than we could evaluate them.

A thinking cap became an OverThinking Cap. Then someone suggested striking out the "over" and suddenly the joke became the design.

A compass mug pointed not to north, but to facts.

A lighthouse journal encouraged people to look for the light.

A set of optical illusion coasters invited people to look again.

We walked into the presentation expecting them to pick a handful, or worse to laugh us off.

Instead, they picked most of them and took us on retainer as an idea partner. (crazyyyy!)

What surprised them wasn't just the ideas. It was how fully they felt like ThePrint. None of them relied on slapping a logo onto an object. Each one took an aspect of journalism and translated it into something people could use, wear, hold, or laugh at.

Merchandise is often treated as branding's least imaginative cousin. A logo on a mug. A logo on a tote bag. A bigger logo on a diary.

But the moment we stopped thinking about branding and started thinking about objects, the ideas got better.

A mug could communicate a belief, while a notebook could communicate a habit, and a coaster could communicate curiosity.

Changing the format changed the thinking. Perhaps because every creative discipline comes with invisible rules. You absorb them without noticing. After a while, your brain starts solving problems the same way every time. But when you move into an unfamiliar format, those rules loosen their grip. Suddenly connections appear that wouldn't have appeared otherwise.

We set out to create merchandise. What we accidentally created was a reminder that sometimes the fastest way to find new ideas is to change the shape of the problem.