Media & Merch - Taking the Brand Home

Overview

Events arrived faster than bespoke work could keep up with. Custom manufacturing was ten weeks minimum, twelve to get something made in China and shipped around the world, and then customs and couriers in languages we didn’t speak. There was the environmental cost of it too: things made on one continent, flown to another, wrapped in packaging that got opened once. So the question became what we could do in advance that would work anywhere, and what we could hand to the ecosystem so they could serve themselves.

Approach

The way out was to work out in advance what would hold anywhere, rather than solving each event from scratch. Then to hand as much of it as possible to the ecosystem, so people could get what they needed without a request landing on a designer three days out.

Self-serve swag

The answer turned out to be a set of pre-approved designs behind an e-commerce style interface. Anyone in the ecosystem could go in, pick the design they wanted, and place the order themselves, putting in their own delivery details and their own phone number. That meant each person dealing with their own order, rather than one person, me, trying to keep every order straight from a central distribution point while also running creative production for the event itself. They got a sense of ownership over what they’d chosen, and the responsibility that came with it.

The same interface worked for us. The events team and others inside the Foundation had direct access, so they could place an order for whatever they needed. I clicked approve, and it appeared.

Taking our brand home

Some things do deserve to be bespoke. The corgis started from a simple pain point: people coming to our events had left family at home, and were trying to find a present while running between meetings. So instead of a water bottle, a t-shirt and a tote bag, we gave them the present.

The first one we came to call the vanilla corgi. People loved them, and we’d made slightly fewer than we needed, which gave them a scarcity they kept. After that there was one for each city: an ice hockey corgi, a Portuguese rooster corgi, a ski corgi, a lion dance corgi, a holiday sweater corgi, a Brussels tourist corgi, an Elvis corgi for Vegas, a Paris stripy t-shirt corgi, a Bangkok elephant pants corgi, and two different astronaut corgis.

For Lisbon we built a vending machine: answer questions about Filecoin and it dispensed an astronaut corgi. People queued for over an hour outside our booth at Web Summit to take one home.

They posted about them. They tracked down enough to give one to each of their kids. That put the logo in their homes, where they’d see it every day.

DWeb Decoded: building a network

DWeb Decoded ran weekly for a long stretch, 128 episodes on YouTube. It worked as a networking tool as much as a publication: a reason to get in front of people, a way to build relationships, and a way to get signal out when we were at events and recap what mattered.

Although the majority of production happened remotely, we took the opportunity when we were in person with interesting people to reach out, make a connection and invite them onto the podcast, talk to them about our technology, and produce something that would last. Two episodes were shot in Davos, on a rooftop over the town during the World Economic Forum, in front of a fire pit. The show became a good vehicle for both ends of that: sitting down with people like Cory Doctorow, and going deeper into our own ecosystem than a blog post would let us.