“Hey. Check out this couch. Absolutely post-modern. It even has a cool name: Oi. Oh, it’s not available in stores; we just wanted to catch your attention at New York’s annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair. We’re Cocoon Branding Inc., a feisty little firm from Winnipeg, Canada. We don’t have any A-list clients-yet. But we’ve collected a whack of awards. And you’re gonna love us.”
That pitch came from Cocoon principal Kyle Romaniuk at the recent ICFF. In a bid to launch Cocoon as an international branding firm, the agency came up with a novel idea: develop and design its own unique furniture for the fair to show potential clients Cocoon is an ideas company, capable of building a brand through design.
“We’re in Winnipeg,” Romaniuk says. “We look outside at the rest of the world and its level of creative, and we try to do creative that good. And in Winnipeg, we’re limited by the number of potential clients that are in this market that want that level of creative, can recognize that level of creative, or have the budgets for it.”
Romaniuk’s new product designer, Craig Alun Smith, came up with the furniture promo idea-not surprising, since he hails from Winnipeg furniture design firm Plastic Buddha. He designed and built multi-cube, re-arrangeable Oi furniture (described as Lego for adults) in just three weeks. “We started an exercise where we created a brand, decided what the brand stands for and then did a brand-driven product design,” Romaniuk says. In this case, Oi was designed to answer the question, “What if an object could adapt to people’s changing sense of style?”
It certainly got attention at the furniture fair, and landed Cocoon one new client: Hudson, N.Y.-resident Sophia Valenti, who’s about to open a small, high-end furniture store. Oi caught her eye: “The white thing with the green thing underneath it. I had never even heard of a branding firm in my life,” she says. “And it’s also something I would have avoided because for me, that’s not my style.” But she was sold on Romaniuk’s pitch.
Still, Rob Warren, director of the Asper Centre for Entrepreneurship in Winnipeg, suggests the connection between sofa design and an agency’s branding skills is tenuous. “Nice concept, good execution, but for a company that’s in the branding industry, I see that as a weird way to brand yourself. To me, you’re diluting what you do. I don’t see the connection to the core business.”
Warren adds if he were offering marketing advice to the agency, “I’d be saying try and find yourself a bigger client who’s going to make an impact for you, that the thing with branding is word of mouth gets you more of a reputation, gets you further along than stunts like that.”
But Romaniuk’s hyped about Oi. “Once we’ve made it outside, people in Winnipeg will hear about what we’re doing, and they’ll just come to us,” he declares.
Alternately, Cocoon can always make furniture; the Oi design intrigued more than 50 retailers at the ICFF. Should that happen, Romaniuk wouldn’t partner with a Winnipeg furniture manufacturer. He’d want to join forces with a company that’s “bigger, with more distribution and manufacturing capabilities, opening a door for us to get in and continue developing innovative products for that entity.”
One thing you can say for Romaniuk: He doesn’t think small. Oi, indeed.
