Australian accessories label Bellroy recently collaborated with New York streetwear icon Jeff Staple in the Miller Design Lab to create a customisable bag.
Ragtrader spoke to Bellroy co-founder and CEO Andy Fallshaw about this collaboration and how the business has been impacted by COVID-19.
How has the business adapted to the challenges posed by COVID-19? Have you introduced any new initiatives?
At Bellroy, our goal has always been to help people move through the world with reduced friction and greater peace of mind.
What that looks like for people might be a little different moving forward, so we’re working really hard to design products that will help folks navigate not only their collective re-emergence, but also work and travel habits that will have changed for good.
One area that we’re thinking heavily about is hygiene, and surface transmission – and technologies we can use in the development of our materials to help combat this.
With transmission risks through both airborne and surface paths, even a simple trip to the grocery store has become exhausting as we try to consider all the ways we might be exposed to pathogens.
If we can utilise new technologies to reduce our customers' exposure, that feels like a significant way for us to improve customers' lives.
There are of course technical hurdles to navigate.
For instance, some antiviral and antibacterial technologies come with issues similar to pesticide usage in food chains.
Others have only a short life span before they become ineffective.
We’re working with key strategic partners to develop materials and coatings that can reduce our exposure to pathogens, without significantly compromising sustainability and 'life nurturing' goals.
If the products you interact with daily have self-cleaning properties, that should help with peace of mind.
How does Bellroy perceive the post-COVID consumer market?
The consumer market is more complex and nuanced than we’ve ever seen.
With such rapidly changing landscapes, playing out on a global platform, brands need to be embedded in the communities they serve.
You can no longer have a small group of people build a strategy and tactics that slowly play out over years.
Instead, you need to identify values that align with your customers, and then constantly adjust and nudge tactics according to rich feedback loops.
That makes for a pretty exciting (and challenging) dynamic!
Through this rapidly changing world, one thing we’ve been enormously grateful for is the diversity of the team within Bellroy.
When landscapes are changing as fast as they currently are, there are significant benefits to having diverse views within an organisation.
Not only can these help a brand understand emerging themes, they can also help navigate an authentic path through them that is still true to the shared values that brand holds.
Life feels easier when you surround yourself with views the same as yours, but it can also result in rapid extinction.
The more we can lean into discomfort, constantly challenging ourselves with different perspectives, the more hope we have of bringing value to this rapidly evolving world.
Please describe the process of creating the customisable bag.
Any creative process starts with a catalyst, and for this project, it was the goal of celebrating Melbourne’s creative heartbeat, and the individual expression of it.
But we wanted to plant a worthy seed, and to do that well, it meant taking an existing Bellroy product, and working with the Staple team to put a new spin on it, one that would create a compelling canvas for this expression to happen around.
Pretty quickly we zeroed in on a remix of our Premium Edition Sling, which is one of our most loved products.
It’s a bag that can carry your essentials from day to night without missing a beat.
So we kicked off with our teams jamming over video channels, working out how to dial up the details to new levels.
After a couple of iterations, I managed to squeeze a trip to NYC (pre-COVID) to finish the concepting with Jeff and his team in person.
Bringing our first samples into their space meant we could touch and feel the potential directions in higher fidelity.
Being surrounded by their NYC spaces and inspiration was a neat way to make sure the final result felt as cohesive as we could make it.
When you’re trying to create something that will resonate with such vibrant audiences, you have to make room for each individual to put something of themselves into it.
So throughout this initial design phase, we were cognizant of leaving enough space for the creative expression to follow.
So we pushed the materials and functionality as far as we could, while leaving enough of a canvas for that individual expression to be woven (or painted) onto it.
What was it like for Bellroy to work with Jeff Staple on this project? What did the business learn from him?
Jeff balances two rarely combined traits – being both really warm and really professional.
It meant the design side of this project felt incredibly smooth, while also being great fun.
We both have talented teams alongside us, but we also both come from design backgrounds.
So we could brainstorm quickly with our teams, and then make decisions confidently with each other in the moment. That’s a luxury that is not always possible!
Our biggest learning was around just how embedded in their communities Jeff and his team are.
You can see the influence of fashion, music and creative communities weaving themselves through their design studios, in ways that can’t help but rub off on the team.