vi-R-us

I gave this interview a while ago Marta Gonzalez Muguruza which was published in Argentina’s Report Publicidad. I thought I’d put it up here.

1) What’s the story behind Nicolas Roope?
Born in Singapore in 72 and soon moved to the uk. I studied fine arts and graduated from Liverpool art school in 94. the only famous person who went there was John Lennon but i guess he’s famous enough. then i got involved with an arts group called antirom. We created a company that produced interactive art and commercial art projects for clients like Levi’s and Toyota. antirom worked closely with the then famous design group Tomato. after that i took the creative director role at oven digital a US based interactive design company based out of new york. Tiffany.com was a project that came out of that time. then after that i set up a company called poke which again is creatively focused and has clients such Nokia, Alexander McQueen, Yahoo and The BBC. Poke are allied to progressive and highly regarded advertising agency Mother (who also have an office in Buenos Aires.) The Hulger idea emerged during my time at Poke. The original name for Hulger was Pokia because of Poke and Nokia. We had to change it when we applied for our trade marks because Nokia objected. I ran the project as a hobby initially, just buying old phones from ebay, refitting them over evenings and weekends and then put them back on ebay to sell. The New York Times suddenly ran a half page feature on me and the idea and then suddenly i was inundated with opportunities to manufacture, distribute and retail. So i borrowed some cash and made it happen.

2) What’s your definition of “good design”?
Good design for me is when an interesting idea is realised in a way that makes the most of that idea. Sometimes that idea can be a response to a material, a new technique or technology, or can be more of a cultural or conceptual thought like Hulger’s founding concept. Design that is only about form doesn’t interest me that much. Because i come from a conceptual art background and spend a lot of time working as a marketeer I am also very aware that the physical object is only part of what people experience as so much of what makes something meaningful is the story around it which you build by the way you package, represent, sell and what you say about it and of course how you say it. Good design for me is when everything in the chain works.

3) What are you trying to achieve at Hulger?
We’re challenging the boring and uninspiring world of consumer electronics. Designers seem to occupy themselves with design standards like chairs, sofas and tables but never seem to touch electronics, partly because they’re a lot more complex but also because the economics are very challenging. We think it’s a shame that you can buy lots of interesting and varied fashion and interior design objects and yet in electronics it’s all very much the same. Most of the big brands in the sector just play to the mainstream which creates homogeny when what people really want are broad and varied choice. The tech world is really run by numbers guys and geeks so i guess it’s no surprise that the approach is so mechanistic and devoid of any poetry. Of course that makes it a massive opportunity for anyone who can offer real alternatives. At the moment Hulger only produces phones because we need to be very single minded as we build the brand so people are very clear where we’re coming from. So many brands diversify far too fast and end up being indistinct and undifferentiated. We can’t afford that if we are to gain recognition worldwide with a marketing budget the size of a teenager’s pocket money.

Like i said before we are only too aware that so many other factors effect the way people perceive what we do. That is why so many other aspects of the business are as unusual as the products themselves. For a start we do our own distribution, our own PR and marketing, our own design. Our margins are thus better and we’re much more in control of where we sell. It means we’re thinking about and carefully managing every tentacle and also are able to grow and develop new products and ideas without the need for outside finance which inevitably would compromise our movements.

Looking to the future i think there’s a lot of room for diversifying. We briefed st martins design school in london to think about how Hulger thinking would touch other technologies. I worked very closely with the students who produced some really wonderful ideas and designs many of which have subsequently been published around the world, further proof of the validity of our approach (you can see these ideas at: hulgerisation.com )

4) How important is the conflict between concept and use?
Very important. Art is very often about this kind of tension. Design is often considered to be the process of making something really useable and taking away these kinds of conflicts but that also tends to neutralise products. What we do doesn’t make sense on one level because it seems impractical and thus ‘bad design’ and yet you hear reports from customers all the time saying how much they enjoy their handsets and how they change the experience of calling, making it more precious and sensual, making it special again because mobile phones have otherwise made calls so short, frequent and functional.

If you consider car design I think it is well accepted that the models that people are really passionate about also tend to be the least practical. You couldn’t call a Ferarri practical could you and yet people are almost religious in their reverence and appreciation of the brand.

I work with the internet and this tension is something we use a lot there too. When you bend the rules you get a very interesting effect and this can really stir emotions. One project we produced at Poke is just like this: globalrichlist.com . It subverts expectation and really shocks people in a very powerful and persuasive manner. We could have dealt with the subject in a much more informational way but it would never have made such an impact (it has now been seen by over 2.5 million people and is still going strong with no marketing spend at all. It still comes in number one on a google.com search for “rich”).

So playing with the tension works very well if the chemistry is right.

5) Objects have a history saturated with references to specific contexts and moments in time, where do the P*Phones stand?
The three phones we make have quite different references. The Penelope*Phone relates to 1920’s aristocrasy, the P*Phone to 50’s post war boom america and the PIP to 80’s minimalism. Because our products are technological people often consider them to be retro, which i understand. However when fashion references the past it is not considered retrogressive but an acceptable and necessary aspect of fashion’s playfulness. In fact it is this very process that enables us to ‘read’ fashion.

6) Where the P*Phones thought as selling products right from the start?
No not at all. The possibility was always there but i wasn’t 100% confident that it would work. It was only when we had an explosion of interest that I was prepared to make the jump. That’s what is so great about the internet, it enables you to put ideas out there with no risk and no cost and then see what the reception is like before making any commitments. It also meant that by the time the products became available we already had a strong relationship with customers who had followed the story from the beginning. We’d built a brand, almost by mistake.

7) How important is marketing for you?
Very important but i understand marketing in a different way to most. A majority of the companies I work with still consider marketing to mean advertising and this view is quickly becoming old fashioned. The brands that will do well in the future are ones built from the center - out. The web in particular makes this a much more efficient and stable way to build brands and relationships. If we had taken a traditional route to launching Hulger in the fifteen markets we launched in last year we’d have to have spent millions. We did it on less than ten thousand pounds and with little additional marketing spend now have a presence in over 25 markets.

All too often I see companies with PR , advertising, direct marketing, product development, retail all working separately, often reporting into different parts of the business. Not only is this inefficient but it also stops a lot of interesting things happening. We think the product is a core part of the marketing process so our decisions about the product are informed as much by what we want to say about Hulger as it is about making it work in abstract. The recent collaboration with Bill Amberg is a really good example of this. I knew the phones would look gorgeous covered in exotic skins and i also knew that people were a bit confused about where our brand sat in the market so weren’t confident of our price point. A tie up with a well known luxury designer was really useful to us because in a luxury context people don’t ask why the phones cost more even though they have less buttons. Through the collaboration we created new products lines aimed at a new market and helped build our profile. For Bill Amberg it meant confirming his position as the innovator, design aficionado and expert craftsman. As a collaboration there was little outlay but the value to both brands enormous. Unsurprisingly, pictures of the products have been published worldwide.

In short my approach is to look at what inetrest we can create in the core offering before looking for distraction or embellishment. Consumers/users/ people are getting smarter and a lot more organised, mainly through the web and this is making it harder for traditional advertising to work. The golden age of advertising is over and suddenly meaningful product differentiation is the most important thing again. If you get that right the customer will do the marketing for you. Nike and Apple are two brands that really get this and it’s working very well.

How was the Hulgerisation project developed and what was the result?
Hulgerisation was simply a way to show validity in our philosophy, to suggest how we might extend in the future and to have something interesting to talk about over a period when there were no core product stories. Again there were no costs involved and we got a lot of good coverage out of it that really helped to assert our brand.

9) What products, not designed by Hulger, would you say have the “hulger touch”?
The Mini. This is a modern car that drives better than most, has all the functions we’d expect these days and yet is crammed with attitude, personality and playfulness that runs from the core out to a lot of the communications. Compare the Mini to the new Beetle. First of all the the Beetle’s design has been nutralised by rational design process that has edited out all the quirks, the things that made it interesting the first time round. The product AND the marketing both lack the irreverence we knew from the Herbie years, there’s no cheekiness and it all feels calculated and contrived. Next to the Mini it feels really boring even though the heritage, timing, technology etc are almost a mirror image. You also rarely hear people describing the mini as ‘retro.’

Lomo cameras are also a close relation. They use very old technology and don’t “perform” as well as modern cameras but the quality of the objects and the images they produce are so special and distinct, so full of character and atmosphere they remain very popular. They are not loved because of what they were but what they are now.

10) Could you elaborate on Hulger.org?
One approach would to be very direct about Hulger, what we do and why we do it. But it’s hard to get people’s attention to listen to what we have to say and gets quite abstract quite quickly and so again we loose attention. Hulger.org lets us talk about our inspiration and how we think but through examples, each of which are interesting and accessible to the reader. For the site visitor there’s a reason to come because they get something out of their visit yet in the process learn a bit more about Hulger. We keep it quite separate to the main site because for many customers it’s a bit irrelevant. But for our biggest and most active advocates this is really interesting so it is mainly there to serve them and they will also be the ones who will make the effort to find it. One of the web’s great powers is the way audiences are self selecting, i.e. it’s there for those that want it and invisible to those that don’t and worse who might be confused by it.