Dare to build a world, not just a brand - Mike Perry (Tavern Agency)

I think like within heritage brands is the realm because they've existed for so long, they may or may not be timeless already. Most likely they are not. And it's timeless. This is it's that thing you can never get, right? It's the point of the graph that keeps flattening out for some reason, but it's also something you have to constantly work and build towards. You keep going to not get it, but that's what gets you to that level, right? It's not a thing timelessness doesn't just happen. JFK or Carolyn Bissette Kennedy are timeless icons. But they just didn't happen over time, right? I'm trying to pick people not brands on purpose, right? But there is an aesthetic. There is like a world in which like they pushed and that kind of came out. Welcome to the Daring Creative D podcast, who show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Radim Malinic, I'm a designer, author and eternally curious human being. I'm talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that inspired lifetime discoveries, taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most delighted. Let me begin this episode with a question. Are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create? Today I'm speaking with Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, a Brooklyn based branding and packaging agency. Mike has gone from designing punk posters and dreaming of working for SAPPOP to now leading global brand work. From catholic school corridors and bartending shifts with his parents through NBC Sports, five major agencies and strategic detour through Tiktok, he's chasing subculture to become a guardian of the brands that shape it. He never chooses between the chaos and the craft because we need both. In this conversation, Mike shares why timelessness is built on tension, why eBay needs Pinterest every time and why he's widely optimistic about the future of branding. It's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with Mike Perry. Hey Mike, welcome to the show, how are you doing today? Thank you so much, good stuff to be here. Exciting times, you are a person in the branding world with opinions and I like that. So today, I mean we're definitely going to go and see if we can sort out the world of branding in the next hour or so. But as you know from the show, I always ask people for those who might have not heard of them, how would you introduce yourself? Who's Mike Perry? What do you do? Where are you? Yeah, so thank you. We're going to get some hot opinions, I'm pretty sure by the end of this. Some controversial ones we hope. But yeah, Mike Perry, I am the founder and creative officer of Tavern, a branding and packaging agency focusing on food, then hospitality and sports, all the things that make up a great Tavern. And right now we are in Brooklyn and coming very soon, potentially London. More on that later. More on that later. Exciting times. Okay, Mike, I want to know, what's it like to be a branding designer in the year of 2026? A lot different from when I started, I feel like. I love it. I mean, personally, I think it's challenging. I think in a world where everyone thinks that they're a branding expert or a marketer, I think that definitely adds to the challenge and adds to, you know, hopefully some things will solve in this conversation of just a lot more education to people, to brands, to marketers, to consumers. So it's definitely a challenge. Different world than I think when we started, when I started at least, and definitely a different world, you know, two, three decades ago. I like your answer when you said, I love it. And then you said, it's challenging. It gets real, real quick. So what we threw where you are today and how you got here, because you've been in industry for about 15 plus years, and you've been running Tavern for the last sort of four plus years. So talk me what got you into it because you said it's a lot harder. It's more challenging to when you started. So let's go back those 15 years and see what we can find. All right, we'll go back. We'll go right when I graduated. I went to Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Not many people know that, but Paul is Cher fame. So it's a little shot out there. But yeah, my first job was really at NBC Sports, where I worked on basically all of their properties. It was really cool. It was sports. It was, I could really explain that to my parents, which was quite nice. They knew exactly what I was doing after a few months. Finally, after all of these years of wanting to be a graphic designer, they could wrap their heads around it because I could say, hey, it's on TV and I made that. But yeah, we were working on properties like it was the Tour de France 150th anniversary, which is really cool. I think I did this whole thing where you would track the bikers on a website, which it was groundbreaking stuff back then. That didn't really happen. It sounds so rudimentary now. Wednesday night rivalry for the NHL, Sunday night football, really designing the kind of looking fields for the properties. And then I was low man on the totem pool. Obviously I was the junior. So just doing everything that everyone asked me for, asking for more ultimately. I need to step in because you just said that your parents got to finally find out what you do. What was their background and what did you grow up to see creatively that got you tempted to go to Philly to design school? Yeah. So my parent, my mom is a Catholic school teacher and my dad is a mailman. And they were both bartenders. So that kind of comes in later. So the old tavern of it all. But you know, second jobs are always bartenders and service was kind of half of the equation, I would say, and in kind of their influence on me and my mom being a teacher, obviously, like they understood creativity and really pushed it. I mean, I feel like I was constantly in art camps since I was a toddler of sorts, right? So it was very much there. In middle school, I knew I wanted to go to art school. I was the kid that just hung out in the art classroom, like during free periods and at the end of the day, as I'm sure like everyone listening to this probably was in some way. And they were like, no, absolutely not. You're going to get a real degree. It's like art is a real degree. No. So that was just, you know, the constant, like middle school, high school battle of that. And that's why I actually went to Temple University and Tyler School of Art was the art school within the university. And unlike RISD, unlike kind of like specific art schools, art schools only, you got what they perceived as a college degree. And so like if I had a fall back, I had a university degree, not just bachelor of fine arts, even though that's literally what I got either way. But, you know, it made them feel good and it is a wonderful school. So it was awesome. But that kind of led me into the design world. I always knew I wanted to design and honestly branding. I don't think I would have called it that then, but I wanted to really pump posters and flyers for shows and album art. I've definitely for a long period of time, I wanted to be the art director at Subpop, who actually ended up working for Dusty Summers. It was great. But yeah, like wanted to do that whole world, didn't know what it was, as I think a lot of us, at least in my era of design thought, and then you went to art school and then you're in art school and you start thinking, maybe I should be a sculptor. That's a lot of fun over there. But then it's like, no, keep your eye on the prize. We're going to be doing, you know, not fine arts design. And that's really, it was nice because you got in art school, we got this kind of full world experience. We had to take the sculpture classes. We had to take the woodworking classes. We had to take the painting and the drawing, which did really inform your design really well. I know it was forced in our first year, but so yeah, it was really like, knowing I wanted to do something like this and just the through line of the area. I'm liking it. There's two different worlds. It's like, okay, I'm going to be official. I'm going to have a degree from something proper. But then you talked about the punk rock posters and that kind of stuff, because it's almost like there to embrace the chaos. I mean, I came through music and design. Like this was my initial connection. This was my step in and I was totally immersed in that world. So what was it like for you that I kind of feel like was that dissonance? Like, did you, I mean, the first person by the way to say that they were considering it to be a sculptor and didn't become a sculptor. Because I'm thinking, there's a punk rock and there's a sculpture. There was like a week of that. Let's, you know, it was like, oh, we're going to do that. We're going to be a painter one week. It is exploratory early art school for sure. But yeah, you have a two. I don't know. I still kind of find that to be relevant today. I think that you need the chaos. You need the subculture of it all to really make the corporate brand led of it all. I mean, without subculture, we wouldn't have icons. I was actually just listening to a podcast. I forget what it's called, but it's with Lee Mashmeyer, Collins and the woman who I'm forgetting her name. I follow her sub stack, the business of sociology, but they were talking about like what makes an icon and it was all about like subcultures and bootlegs. And I was like, yes, exactly that. That actually like rationalizes those two worlds, right? We need to have all this punk rock, being in bands, making posters, shit that has no purely creative negative dollar effect on my life. It's costing me money ultimately to do. And then you also need the like big brand, or at least I do the big brand of it all, which is paying the bills, but also that's enforcing it. Culture enforcing brand and vice versa. So I think you need it both. And I think that's ultimately source material, which I'm obsessed with in general. I think many designers have said this by no means my thing, but like, I don't think designers even still, but the computers and internet and whatever, like, we're not getting enough source material in general. We need to be out exploring. We need to be, you know, like we're saying, do you go to books? I don't know if you go to bookstores. That's insane. I hope every designer you talk to is like, I'm constantly at a different bookstore looking at new things, right? And you need that material, you get that source material. It's really interesting what you're saying, because to you and I, that makes perfect sense. You need to go there. In fact, like you go to the bookstore, you turn left and you go to other places to find some source materials. The younger generation, they'll be like, I've done my Pinterest board. This is that, that, that, that, that. This is what I've got. This is their source material. And there's nothing wrong with it. Apart from the fact that you need that lived in experience, that first hand experience of something fair or something physical, like how do you matter makes you feel because you get first and foremost, you get taken out of your natural environment to actually say, you know what, I'm feeling something different rather than saying, I'm focused on exactly what I need to solve right now with the help of Pinterest or whatever LLM machine, trying to formulate an idea. So I've been waiting, what would you describe it? I think it's awesome because yeah, those first hand experiences from geeks, posters, all of that stuff. When we talk about chaos, that was the main essence. That was the main ingredient. There was no rules by saying it was similar, legible. Here we go. You know, down. Yeah, probably. Yeah. I mean, the Pinterest, yes, I will say to be fair, I feel like my teachers beat that into me in college, in art school, where they're like, you get out of here, get out of the computer lab. I feel like they definitely beat that into us. I'm closer to this current generation. I feel like of being one of those people who maybe I wasn't getting enough source material and I remember getting reprimanded for it. So even though I was in all the bands doing all the shit, still like, yo, you need more constantly. And I agree with it. And but to the Pinterest thing, we have a fuck Pinterest rule in our studio where it's like, absolutely not. Yeah, sure, you can use Pinterest, but making your mood boards or making a Pinterest board and acting like that's like cool or even doing like all of your research purely on that. I am so utterly against. And I think it's not to get into the weeds, but it's because of algorithms, because we're all looking at the same thing. So I'll talk from ragged edge somewhat recently. He had an image of someone holding a smoothie in a clear cup into the sky with the blue background. And I'm saying that and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. I'm sure everyone listening to this has that on one of their Pinterest boards or one of their mood boards for some route somewhere. And I think it's, yeah, there's something nice about the shared experience, but I think it's if it's a shared experience in real life, higher albert's URL, then I find it interesting. That is what's really resonating in culture, not what's resonating in our little heads and our little boxes on our little Pinterest board. It's not enough. You got to go deeper. Anyone can do that now. Right. Well, you have to go deeper. And I do think you have to live in the chaos. You have to breathe in the chaos. You have to go to the bookstore and something's going to happen on the way there or the way home, right? Like maybe we'll find a new store along the way. I don't know, but I can't. That you need to, I think, open your mind to the unknowing and experience different things and force yourself to experience those things. We'll be back after a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Lux Coffee Co. The first creative speciality coffee company building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond. Lux Coffee Co offers exceptional coffee sourced from around the world through ethical and sustainable practices. And you can discover the current range of signature blends and single origins, coffee hardware and accessories, along with exceptional apparel, at LuxCoffee.co.uk. You can use the code podcast to get 15% off your first order. Versa typing it in. So we know you went to Philly to school. Let's sort of fast forward a little bit like how did you get to starting your own show just more than four years ago? Where did you find yourself for that time in the middle? Yeah, so the time in the middle. So after that, after NBC Sports, I went to this place in Philly called Quaker City Mercantile where I led Hendricks Gin, along with a few other William Grant brands and some Diageo work as well. That's the top line of it. Guinness, well with Diageo, which was really fun, new to world innovation stuff for Guinness Brewers Project, Tophouse 13, which the UK folk will, I believe it's still over there. It's not here anymore, unfortunately. And then I left there, went to Stranger and Stranger for a brief period of time, which got me to New York and then quickly left after that and went to JKR because it was a little just too pack focused for me. I came from Hendricks, which was like deep immersive brand work. Deep immersive brand world. We were 360 AOR to just pack, pack, pack every day, which I love, but really, it's not really brand building, it's purely packaging, in my opinion. So when I went to JKR, I was hired to lead Budweiser US and Global. So worked on Bud, along with tons of other Anheuser-Busch products. A lot of Diageo work. So we did some whiskeys, some new to world innovation type stuff, along with a few fast food, fast casual restaurants. Left there, went to Designbridge. Purely because my time was going to up, grew and learned and wanted something different, but I purely left at the end of the day, just because I knew they had Paps Blue Ribbon as the client and I'm obsessed with old beer brands. And I knew they had all these old trademarks under the Paps brand. And I was like, I need to just get on a Paps project. And so I went over there. They also had Diageo, so it kind of made sense from a category shift. Why do they bring me on? So I led the beer and spirits there, worked on some Mutory, which carried over to today, and then worked there for a while. I learned a lot, learned how to grow a team and really foster a team. So much so that I had no one's ever fired or quit under me on that team, which was is incredible. I've actually haven't thought about that in for a very long time, but yeah. So retention rate was 100%. And everyone, when I left, I made sure that everyone grew into their roles almost rapidly. So when I left, I had a succession plan for all of them, which think creative directors do this. I don't think many people think of it, but I felt so strongly about the team where I had two DDS and kind of it split off. And I left and made sure that they were creative director immediately when I left. So kind of everyone elevated their roles and because they were already doing it. Right. So I kind of purposely did that. It's important because I think you learn a lot at all these different places throughout your career. The ending was very much learning how to manage correctly, which isn't taught most of the time. And I don't know if I was really taught it, but. I think you got to learn the hard way and that was a bulk of it. I left. I went to TikTok, kind of bookended my career at in-house. I started in-house at NBC Sports. I went agency side and then I finished at TikTok, which was a completely different role. I was hired as a creative strategist. So purely like, you know, big ideas connecting the brands to the platform and creating work within that. This partly to burn some non-competes as well, but so that I could actually start my agency, but. It was really interesting to kind of step sideways and really dip my toe and like grind it out in like more strategy work and writing work, which did really help. So kind of using every step that I talked about in like learning a different skill or upskilling or trying to do something different so that I had a better grasp on starting an agency. And so after that, I started Tavern. We focus on food and hospitality, like I said, and really. We're deep within kind of the spirits, spirits and bevel space and hospitality. And, you know, small part of it is sports, which is more the big brand activation type stuff. I mean, everything that you've described is like you've literally gone and trained yourself into becoming what you needed to become to open your agency. I mean, it just sounds amazing because you even have in a succession plans for your DDs. Learning to be a good leader and it's learning like no one teaches you that. Unless you really go and spend time on yourself. It's a school of hard knocks to actually understand like how all of this works. So this sounds quite absolutely amazing that in the way, have you put it all together and go, now I'm ready. As you were talking through this, apart from NBC and TikTok, obviously everything's about packaging, everything's about branding. Where did it love for products and brands and FMB and FMCG come through? I don't know. And I've tried to think about this many times. I think it came with my second job where I was like punk posters, punk flyers. Alba Mart of any kind is the coolest thing you can do, or at least to me, I thought was the coolest thing you could possibly do. And then that's not, we're not going to know more, at least when we were starting, are you going to totally make a career out of that? You kind of have to do some other things. And then I really feel like, what do I want to work on all day is alcohol was the coolest second thing. And now I think it's the coolest thing. I do think like that kind of opened my eyes when I fumbled into working in alcohol where I was like, Oh, this is sick. This is honestly, it's such a spirit specific. Spears and beer are just such a different category than most other categories that we all work on. It's truly, there's like a Wild West component to it where like it has to behave differently than most brands. I think spirits needs, no matter what the price point is to act more like a luxury brand or a fashion brand than any other brand in the world, than a CPG brand ultimately in the world. I think there's crossover and we can give them the details of that. But like it needs to behave differently. And the brands I was working on and the brands that Quaker City Mercantile, the agency I joined was on was Hendrix Gin, it was Sailor Jerry, which was like literally rock and roll. You know, we were throwing parties at South by Southwest when there was still music there and they were cool, right? Like I'm blanking on the other ones, but every, every one like kind of had this subculture-esque world. And I think a good spirit has to have that. A good brand has to have that in general, but alcohol really felt the coolest. And I don't know why I love chain restaurants, but I'm sure it's the same thing. Like chain restaurants is kind of like the other category passion. It's the experience, it's the hospitality of it all. It's the like something else. It's not just what the brand is, it's kind of what else the brand does that goes into it that I find most interesting. And maybe I'm just just grabbing brand worlds here. I don't know, but it's, I don't know. It's like that extra little bit. You mentioned your parents were bartenders. And that was the reason why you started tov'n. Because I'm thinking in the world of agencies, name-native, after the adjective these days, you know, like forever and fruitful and something. You got tov'n, I'm thinking, okay, it's good now to know how we can join those dots because when you talk about spirits, I mean, talk about that world. It's like it's world building within each brand. Like there's so many layers, even though an actual product is just one thing. What everything that comes around that like 360 world is so intricate and especially if it's done right, it's so intricate and so interesting and so immersive that the bottle sometimes, even though it's the main product, becomes the almost the supporting actor to the hero of the campaign and all of this stuff. So obviously you said like you find yourself like working on spirits, but how did you feel that change going from NBC and all of those roles into something which is so immersive and so intricate? I feel like it all kind of pairs, right? Like it was sports and it was entertainment. But why I love that entertainment in general is you kind of have to do that just in a different medium ultimately because it's the medium is it still is out of home, it's still campaigns, it's still somewhat traditional, above the line advertising. But you just have so much more motion and literal airtime for it, which I think is cool. I actually love and wish that you could do that almost with other brands. So there are interstitials. There's many more because it's like the brand NBC Sports is promoting their own properties. So they're advertising actually more than any other brand who's paying for advertisements and they're shorter, they're quicker, you know, there's six to ten seconds. There's actual 30s and 60s, whatever. And it's just more often more volume and you're trying to communicate and you have time. It's like weird that like that gives you more time. I don't know if people would agree with this nowadays, but in 2012, that was definitely the case. Like you had more time to be building your world. One of the projects we worked on was Formula One when it came to the US. In 2012, no one gave a fuck about Formula One and like even when it was, right? It was funny to think about now. So we had to create the look and feel and then really drag out that story and like overtly tell consumers like why they need to be interested in it, why this is so incredibly cool. And then you have to do it in a cool way because it's not just needed to break the NASCAR of it all, which was perception. So you need to build these worlds in just different platforms. So I think building out a brand world for sports started me off. And then I think once I got into spirits, I was like, oh, this is cool. There's more like real life in the mix of it. We were doing Hendricks, Sailor Jerry, we're doing parties. Hendricks, we made like a flying cucumber at one point where we had multiple parties throughout the country and we did UK parties and stuff. So like it was more immersive. It was bringing everything physically to life, which was just cool. And yeah, it's like, I don't know. They all kind of make sense. I will say to rationalize the food, Bev hospitality and sports, like you were mentioning Tavern and the name. When I was fishing this idea, everyone's like, oh, it's all dusty and old. You're going to get pigeon holed. It's going to be a miserable. And I was like, no, like if you literally look at what taverns were in the United States, they serve drinks, they serve food, full meals. And then upstairs was literally a place to stay. It was it's like full. Everything was offered that we offer in Tavern. So it was a bit on the nose there and sports, too. You know, you talk about sports or you're watching sports, you know, in the more contemporary ones with television. But it all goes together and there's the string between all of it is hospitality. And that comes from, I think, we're going to land this plane somehow. That comes from my parents working in hospitality. Myself, I was a caddy and then I'd also would bartend and serve in the country club and also at some hotels and bars and restaurants and stuff. And I was brought into that and it's both service, food and beverage service, mixed with hospitality that I think is the connective tissue here. I know we're talking about chaos plus hospitality plus big brand. I think that's the magic cocktail there, right? Like of how it comes together, why when you do it correctly, it works. When you talk about hospitality, it makes me think of my friends who work in hospitality and it's chaos. There you go. I know he listens to my podcast. He literally says he used to work in what he's been working in hospitality for 15 plus years. And then he had kids and it was like, I was always ready for kids. You know, you're awake in the middle of the night, you know, dealing with chaos, dealing with a rowdy people, little people. I think the chaos part of it, I think is a sort of through line for this conversation so far because when you think about branding these days, it's easily formulated. I mean, we have been making the brands, the visual systems, you know, making them sort of more refined, they've been spreading faster and further than ever before. So it became a bit more formulaic. So I think that chaos element was slightly removed from it because it's easy to replicate something somewhere with small team rather than needing them. You know, big team and creative sources of assets, animations, that kind of stuff. But the timelessness is vanishing. You'd be in a constant cycle, as you agree, in a constant cycle of seeing new rebrands or satisfying the shareholders price because, you know, is there movement? Is there noise? Is that I'll be making enough noise around the brand because when you talk about Sailor Jerry or Hendricks, there was no rush anywhere. Like when you had a good, when you sort of settle on what it is, when you created that, that stayed what it was and it had incremental moves. Whereas we have worlds with a lot of heritage and we've got new brands with zero heritage, zero stories. And it's just like, how do you mix those two together? Because you can easily spot the gens that fermented drinks or those gut held drinks with the little stickers on them. And then we sit next to you or something, which is more of a heritage. So you've got Clash of the Worlds, but ultimately we play in the same game, almost, mostly the same customers. So in your quest for chasing the timelessness and not trends, where do you start in your challenging journey now? It's very much our philosophy, which is modern heritage. And we work on a lot, mostly heritage brands. We do new to world, definitely applies. We do a startup brands as well. And that absolutely applies. It'll get very confusing if we talk about all of them. I think like within heritage brands is the realm because they've existed for so long. They may or may not be timeless already. Most likely they're not. And it's timeless. This is it's that thing you can never get. Right. It's the point of the graph that keeps flattening out for some reason. But it's also something you have to constantly work and build towards. You keep going to not get it. But that's what gets you to that level. Right. It's not a thing. Timelessness doesn't just happen. JFK or Carolyn Bissette Kennedy are timeless icons. But they just didn't happen over time. Right. I'm trying to pick people not brands on purpose. Right. But there's an aesthetic. There is like a world in which like they pushed and that kind of came out. That might be a bad example because they're no longer with us. But they've kind of grounded themselves in that because of that push. And I think brands need to do that as well. Right. Nike is timeless because they keep innovating, because they keep changing and because they keep pushing themselves forward. If they were just another stuffy shoe brand, we wouldn't be saying we wouldn't be calling out Nike, we'd be calling out Adidas or Puma or whoever. Vans, Converse, it doesn't matter. It is like trying to get to that point and you have to constantly build into it. So how do we do it? Our philosophy is modern heritage. No matter who you are, heritage brand, we have a three step process, which really boils down to discovery strategy and design. We have cute names for it, but I'll save that for this. But not step one is really the discovery phase where you dig deep and you go into the archives, you have to go to physical places. Like we were talking before, we often go to historical societies or libraries and microbe fish and we physically build archives. And I keep saying our secret, but the deep secret is not Pinterest. It's actually eBay. So you find stuff on eBay from heritage brands that are sold because a lot of it is just like bottom of the barrel trade materials. Some weird clock that was made in the 70s has some mark on it that doesn't match any of the other marks that they were. You know, I've been using for the last 40 years or old matchbooks or whatever, you know, menus, things that individual restaurants underneath the chain may have done in the 60s and 70s that are different. So you just have that. It's like the source material is almost never ending. And so we go and dig deep to find those things, the quirks, the difference. And, you know, that's the fun stuff. That's the real design area. Nerd stuff, which influences us a lot. But you also now start to have a full visual. Archaeological timeline of the brand. And you can really see what was happening visually speaking, at least. And we talk about verbal and strategy later, but like you see what was happening. And once you start to see what's happening, things obviously pop out. First of all, we know, you know, it's a hundred year old brand. We know that maybe they were famous in the mid century and then died out during the 2000s and they need to be brought back or whatever. And so you can kind of understand their dips and their peaks on, you know, how they were performing in the marketplace. But then you overlay that on top of this visual timeline and see what was working, what was coming to the top then. And also what makes sense for now. Most of the stuff from the past does not make sense now. This isn't an exercise of retro or novelty by any means. It's very much identifying what makes sense. And so we take all of those things and use them as the starting point and modernize them and craft them for the current consumer, but also with future consumer. That's a really interesting process. And like you don't always get with the hundred year old brands and having time to actually spend time on eBay, digging through stuff. That's a real good secret. That's a real good insight. But you said about timeless a few times. And it's not always, for example, people like me, when you say timeless, always comes to music. I feel like what is the definition of timeless? It's something that sounded or made you feel something in a really positive way. And then you're replicated by every contact with it over and over again. And when you mention Nike, because there's always an element of something that really worked and you see it, it was like, that still makes a connection. That is still something what they did. If it was a like, if it was a strategy, if it was just a feeling like it just works. And with music, like you listen to a track, you know, like. Yep, still sounds great. Still makes me feel something. And it's just like, how do you replicate that? Because those are moments that are almost physical. And you come to physical contact with something and you have this physical reaction. And in that sort of treadmill of. Brands, rebrands, retooling, like new launches, new campaigns. The world is much busier, much more noisy. Like how do you make that moment? Because it would be really interesting to see how much of the things that we create now will become timeless. Right. Definitely. And I like the music and melody. I started with, I don't know, American icons, which probably the worst example of timelessness, but like fashion music. Give me a musical track that you find timeless. Oh, I just listened to Cowgirl by Underworld the other day. It's good, I'd famous everything line. And it just, it's from 2000. No, it's from like 91 or 92. And you can think of like how some of the things really sound of its time. I had a big discussion with a pervabaxi about 1995 when they started Dixon Baxi, it was like in 1995, the music that came out was most amazing. And the albums that did something different, but rooted in heritage and sort of more traditional sounds or sampling, something that was more jazz based or film scores survived, kind of stayed on and became timeless albums. Whereas some people had tried like the gimmicky, like the new machines or whatever. Like the drums just sounded just a little bit of its time. They didn't really last. They didn't withstand the test of time and they sound like 1994, where some of the albums absolutely survived. And it's hard to say like how you put your life on a heart and soul into something like this, but that shines through the work. Definitely. And I think there was a lot there, but I love the fact that you said it was 2000 and then actually it was 1991. I think that proves the timeless thing. Like you just rationalize your timelessness argument that I can't even pinpoint it. It's always been there. That proves the bit of time worth this. And then you were saying in 1994 with your cheesy drum machines and whatever. That's because the drum machine was trendy at the time, right? That was the trendy thing that was what everyone was doing. And I think that falls into like the trend category and it sticks to an aesthetic of a time period because that's what everyone's doing. And it's not because you're trying to make really great music and really great music is built upon the past. Everything is built upon the past. Whether we like it or not, we just have to make sure that we ditch the wrong parts of the past, obviously. But it goes through a principle where I love this and I forget who came up with it, some architect in the mid century, I'm pretty sure, but it's called the Maya principle. It's the most advanced yet acceptable. That's how he applied it to architecture and building commercial buildings for people or something. I think you can apply it to anything, both music, branding, any creative endeavor where we're not trying to reinvent the wheel and throw the baby out with the bathwater. We're trying to take all the good parts that everyone is familiar with collectively and then tweak them to where they still can be on board. But they're not going to be so, oh, this is left completely left field. And I think that's where that's the starting point of where you can really create timelessness and timeless brands or even music. So music, for instance, right? Like we can inch it up with some middies or synthesizers or whatever. And if it was 1994, but it's when we go full bore into it, we're only using that and we're saying, this is our whole thing. It's not acceptable anymore. Right. It's true advanced. And I think balancing that tension of, which is modern heritage, literally, it's like balancing the tension between heritage and modernity. You always need to, you need to be in conflict with that to get there. And I think that when you have that and there is tension, that should equal timelessness if done correctly, repeatedly, time and time again and protected. But that's the hard part is the repetition of the tension. It can paralyze you. Like when you think about creating something that's timeless, it becomes only timeless, but it's proved it's time that it actually, it works. And whilst you were talking, I had to actually have to Google the release year. It was actually 1994 when that album came out. But I think it's all about putting the right effort into what you do. I think it's just that element because so many things from a little longer ago still is absolutely amazing. Some of music has come out, you know, 50, 60 years ago, cranky now. You know, it still sounds good because it's about the idea. It's about the execution is about people breathing what they do. And the Maya principle he talks about was actually Raymond Louis. He was an industrial designer. Yeah. Because if someone is screaming, not screaming at the speakers, go in, you know, it was 1994 and it was Raymond Louis. We covered both now. But I like that you used the word tension. I like that you modern heritage is about tension and tension is a strong word that makes the process sound quite serious, quite important. How do you deal with tension? How do you apply it? How do you invent it and how do you keep it on? When you say it and when you're relaying it back to me and very calm, very serious voice, it gives me anxiety just thinking about it, which I think is good. It's like that nervous energy when you're like, have a project and you're like, I don't know, God, we're going to do it. It's going to be sick, but I don't know what to fucking answer it. We got to get into it. It's that it should be that all of the time, which sucks. Right. Can't just do the project. That's it. Move on. We did a good job. It'll go sell. It'll be cool. Everyone's going to love us in 10 years or timeless. No, this is all a grind, which I think took me a long time in design and branding and strategy, I suppose, to realize all of these things are never ending pursuits. Just because the project ends where we're going to have to apply to someone else and we're going to have to push. And I think what I like to do with our clients is we're quite young still, but like we bring on our clients and we don't want them to leave. I believe in the brand guardianship approach to branding to clients. You want them to stay for a decade. That's where the work doesn't happen in quarters, even though Wall Street wants it to. Right. It doesn't. It does take time. Branding takes time, even though there's a rebrand every two years on most brands, which drives me crazy. It's a whole different podcast, probably, but it takes a lot of time to implement these things, to do it correctly, to really understand what's resonating. The tension is the litmus test, I suppose, right? It should be happening all of the time. And as you're developing new and pushing assets or campaigns or platform strategies, that you're always making sure that tension is there and that you are forcing it. And I think that kind of litmus test, your barometer on is it working? It ain't easy. It's never over. Yeah. There's no meant to be easy. That's the thing. Because when you said tension, it felt heavy on this side. I was like, yeah, you can have a perceived tension from the client side going, this needs to be something because it comes from some sort of premeditated, preformed or expectations. Some people think that's whatever they create and have to be absolutely most amazing thing. And then you get people with open mind. And I was like, OK, well, let's see what we can find out. But the tension always is like, if you give a shit about what you create, there will be tension because you will hold yourself to high standards to make sure that happens. So the T word is loaded, but it's necessary. Yes. And this is maybe a cliche, but we as designers and as creative agencies are literally on these brands most of the time, far longer than the brand managers. They kind of will shift off one to three years, three years is kind of a lot even. They shift off and they transition to brands. And that's just how a lot of these brands, at least my entire branding experience, has been. And I, again, maybe it's the cliche, but we are involved a lot more and we should care a lot more. And we should be. We have to be the guardians because no one else is. The umbrella company that's holding all of these brands is not the guardian in the same way they want delivery, quarter delivery, fair enough. And the marketers want quarter to maybe a little bit longer because they're going to be on the brand. They want to do something. I want to make a name for themselves and they want to put their thumbprint on it. Again, all fair enough. I agreed that they should be doing that. And as designers, when all the same things, plus our full creative expression on it, plus we're going to be on here, hopefully the relationship goes well, long after you all. And the brand is going to go on long after all of us, hopefully if we all do our jobs correctly. And so we got to keep that into consideration too. So and that's where like that, the heaviness is a never ending grind. Guardianship of it all needs to come. We need to be protecting brands as well. So we both need to be the innovators and the protectors, I suppose. This is something really important. And you said as people that are working on a brand, they just shift off within a couple of years. And maybe that's part of the reason why we have so many rebrands, so many refreshers, because yeah, people show up like, Hey, this is what I think we should do. When you think about it, it's almost like a short term thinking like politics. You go like people in charge for like four years. They fuck it all up. There's somebody else comes up, they try to fix it. And it's just, it's a short term thinking on a long term project. Sometimes when you scale it up, you know, humanity, society, and then you scale it back to brands, I didn't think about it. Even had that experience with my studio on situations where you get to the end and somebody new steps in. No, no, not yet. Let's change all of it. Why? You've been here for five minutes. How do you keep that creative endurance and guardianship in check that if you get new people on the other side, that you almost stop them from making mistakes, changing things or is that input valuable at any time? The input is always valuable. I'm going to contradict myself, but there is a constant need to evolve is good. So having new leadership shift onto a brand like this is good in theory, because we do want to continually push the brand. The Nike example, you need to modernize consistently. And by doing so, you need to be innovating and doing different things or doing things better or changing how you go. So I'm not. Aaron Berg bass here saying this is your asset. Don't do anything by your asset and call me in 40 years. That's wrong. That's been disproven more recently. I do still believe in equities and key brand assets. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying do that. Short answer is I think it's good and I think it's healthy, but we as the guardians need to be very clear in developing the work. Let's say the project is a brand manager. Number one hires us. We rebrand them two years later, they shift off the brand. Someone comes on and says, we're going to rebrand again. I think it's really important to do that rebrand work the first time you do it really well and make sure that it is set up for success. And if you are good at branding, you will create a brand that is imprenetrable, because that's the goal that doesn't need to be rebranded in two years. Because if you rebranded something, then it needs to be retold in two years. That's a trendy brand. You follow trends. You stuck to the time period. It didn't work. If you did it correctly, it should last a minimum of five years. It really should last a lot longer than that in my opinion, but I'm talking in the modern sense. And so if you do that, then everything else is iterative upon that platform you made. So in my opinion, why the hell are we just going to keep rebranding this beer brand over and over again every two years? Why can't we brand it once? Make a really great brand platform for it that is strong, that gives us room to play everywhere else, to expand the brand world and expand it from a brand world into a universe. That should be the goal with everyone who comes on. So when the new person comes on in two years, they say, great, this brand is ripping. It is working. There's nothing to change from an equity standpoint. We just need to build upon our equities. Nike dunks, Nike dunks was red, black and white because it was after Jordan or whatever. And Nike dunks are now into skateboarding, right? Into drops, into everything. And this is old news now. I sound like an old man now talking about Nike dunks. It expand beyond itself because it was good from the start. It had the athletes, it had the brand. It knew exactly who it was. So the agency, the designers need to be the ones keeping the brand in check while still going wide. And again, I guess that was another point of tension. You need to be strict to your brand and your brand guidelines that you created. But at the same time, you have to have room to play and go wide. So you got to go get to go really wide and do wild things within that brand. But then make sure that it's still tight so that you're not losing the plot. That's tough. That is really where brand guardianship from a design creative agency standpoint comes is really, I think, the gold standard, if you get that right. I love what you said about brand world becomes the universe. That beautifully summed up what the goal is. Yeah, I mean, it just becomes the universe. You know that you can almost reach a timelessness. And actually thinking about our T words today, we got tension, we got timeless. Then you use another T word, which was trends. And you believe that good design doesn't just survive trend cycles. It transcends them, trends and transcending. Where do trends come from? Why do they exist? And why do even trend? I mean, that's a big question. Why does trend become a trend? Is it because too many people find it appealing? It's a big question to ask why do trends work for a while? I don't know, but they are short lived, right? Just inherently a trend is by definition does not last. It is only a short period of time. And I think in our current culture, those trends are burning brighter and faster as we go because of the internet and social and whatever. So I don't know why a trend exists, but I know that it's not something you should be chasing as much as you want to look in our own day to day lives. I'm sure we still do that. There is like, I don't know, the trendy new coat or jacket that you really want. But you know, deep down, you're going to have to buy a new one next year because you don't want to be caught dead in that. We inherently as humans know what a trend is, but they are so alluring that we convince ourselves that we need them, that we are going to follow them. And I think it's the same for branding, but the easiest way of a one pager that we take clients through and I coach new hires and stuff on, which is branded the heart, so it says branded the heart and we have all of the projects we've worked on and all different types of outputs that output can be branding, that output can be packaging, it can be experiential, it could be Hendricks, Jin, Q flying cucumber activation or a giant pigeon that we floated down the Hudson River, which we literally did for New York City Football Club. But it doesn't matter. All of these outputs don't matter. They are purely outputs and they're outputs that disrupt the brand within culture. If you put the brand at the heart of it, nothing you do is incorrect because you're staying true to the brand. La boo boo, I'm just picking a random ass trend. It's no longer a trend. La boo boo, would it make sense for Sizzler to create a cheese toast? La boo boo, that's really cool. I've connected it to the brand who doesn't want to plush piece of toast. I'm sure that that would disrupt quite a few weird internet collectibles communities. That's building upon what the brand is at the heart of things. The brand is like a family steakhouse, right? Hospitality, good food, accessible prices for families. Families are number one is the case. So by doing that, yeah, that'll be a cool little giveaway. It's just a flash in the pan type thing. It's just a trendy little thing that you would do. You would hope to trade for clout or awareness or whatever. It's just dumb. It just is a flash in the pan. It's alluring. I'm saying this, trying to convince myself that's a cool idea because it kind of that would be kind of sick and weird looking, right? But it doesn't make sense. It's going to be too much time effort for something to be also most likely dead. Going back to the trend cycles are faster. And it was already dead for months now. And so even being able to put that into action, you're already late to the game. So now you're focusing all of your energy as a brand to do some thing that is perceived at the moment as trendy, but by the time it comes out and to be old news, which is double paint. Not only did you do that silly thing when everyone was doing that silly thing, you did that silly thing when everyone was not doing it. You're late to the party, which makes you look even worse into tier and your brand even further. Whilst you were talking, I was thinking about trends is like they grow by exposure and they get killed by exposure. Literally just like they just go way too high up and then they die. But I had a quote the other day and it was about pop songs and it said, all you need is three chords and a truth. That's what you need. I mean, you used to call it three chord wonder by someone. I mean, it was only the other day when I had a quote was like, you need three chords and a truth and that truth part was what makes most sense to me. Because what you describe and what you do with your work and how you do it, you need zero trends and the truth. You need three things off eBay and the truth. And kind of find out like how do you connect us together? Because the things that survive to survive for the right reason, because they didn't jump up against too much and too high from the trend or survived. And I think the way you describe it, it makes perfect sense that you can find that longevity. Yeah, I think you need three equities and a truth, baby. Maybe that's what it is. That's where it is. So your work is varied, obviously. You coming from the world of spirits, but, you know, as you said, you've been floating in inflatable pigeon on the river. And I'm never one to ask people for like, oh, how do you see a feature of what you are doing next? Because you could ask people 15 years ago, 20 years ago, like, where do you see yourself in 10 years time? Now we've been talking about where you see yourself in 10 months time. You know, I think it's just everything changes so fast. But with your view on brands and with the view of your way of how you think about stuff, how you create stuff, how excited and how apprehensive are you about what's coming next, because we're going to get more of the same. It's going to be a lot of work to actually make a meaningful change in the world of branding that doesn't seem as formulaic. Is it something that people need to embrace? So does it come from good strategy that people look to the past or is looking to the past not always for every brand? Looking to the past, I think the past informs the future. So I think for everything and anyone in human history and culture, I think it is beneficial. You learn from your past. It should inform your future. Better or indifferent, like it shouldn't inform how you then move forward because the goal is forward movement. Ultimately, growth is always our goal. I'm excited by it. I honestly, I feel like in the last you talked to me two months ago, I'd be like, it's going to be a grind. It's going to be an uphill battle. I'm weirdly optimistic in the last few weeks. And there is nothing. There's no data points and no proof of this optimism. But I feel in my bones that with AI, with social, with internet, and the getting back to analog slightly, I understand that's a trend as well. We're not talking about the trend of back to analog. I truly believe that people are wanting that. Also this post COVID world, people are wanting more of back to what things used to be, which felt more real and more human. I think it's probably going to take longer than I'm hoping. But I think we're going to get back there as a culture just naturally. And I think technology is going to push us back there, which makes me massively optimistic on what we can do because as that then opens up the world of honestly activations of brands coming to life. I wrote an article somewhat recently of IRL versus not URL. And that's how you build a brand. And I believe it. That's how you build friendships. Yes, we were talking earlier before the call. I did build a friendship with a designer on Instagram like we all do. But that turned into a real life friendship. That's the goal. Use the internet to get to the real world or to expand your real world. Right. And I'm just like pining on the why you use the internet now. But I'm optimistic we will get back to IRL more and more often, which will make brands more exciting and better purely because there's more touch points in which you can develop. And I think we've been in this stagnant phase of 10 to 15 years of branding. That's just strip it all out, make it all clean. I know millennial branding is well over, but it's still this it's this sterile millennial branding, Ehrenberg, Bass, stodgy ass way of doing branding. That's not the case anymore. And that's why I'm excited about every project we're working on. That's why we can do big ass pigeons and also story models, but still do fancy old booze. Right. Like it doesn't matter. And that's why I think it's really cool. So I'm wildly optimistic, but really only in the last couple of weeks. I'm glad I found you in a wildly optimistic phase because when you said I'm optimistic, but I don't know why. And I was like, we just killed my question. I thought of like, why are you optimistic? Didn't you be to articulate it? Why all happens because I'm in agreement. I think what's happened through COVID and was they like do more tools, more apps? I mean, everyone was on Clubhouse in during COVID and all of that stuff. It just goes in waves and it oscillates. It goes up and it goes down. I think what was magic in 15 years ago of having events to go to all the time? Gallery openings. It was buzzing and a movement in connection. Obviously, I've been made convenient, but convenience is a lie. Because just because it's convenient, it doesn't mean that it's actually giving us anywhere further. So the way you articulate it was beautiful because I can feel it. You're optimistic and I'm excited where it's all going. So, Mike, thanks for coming to chat to me today. It's been really good because I can feel your passion for what you do. And I'm excited what's going to happen next. So yeah, thank you. Me too. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of daring creativity podcast. I'd love to know your thoughts, questions and suggestions. So please get in touch via the email in the show notes or social channels. This episode was produced and presented by me, Radim Maninage. The audio production was done by Nia Makai from Seven Million Bikes Podcast. 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