by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Designers, Storytelling | Feb 3, 2015
Make something. Use your hands. What’s coming back to me is the realm of the personal — that which is made by a person, from that person, to me. As we’ve moved GIRVIN from downtown Seattle [they’re demolishing our building] to the bottom of West Queen Anne, we’ve all...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts | Jan 29, 2015
THE JOURNEY OF DISCOVERING IS NEVER A STRAIGHT LINE Brand. Place. Team. Community. Who is it, where is it, what is it, who are we talking to? When there is a new inquiry — a brand to be evolved and rebooted in some manner — I make it a point to get out there, wander...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Scent | Jan 27, 2015
Earth head down, to the roots and up to the wood [above: a pitch burl from a pine in the Grand Canyon] As a person that walks the woods, it is a place that is alive with scent. The mystery of the trees, in their own complex and profoundly beautiful ecosystem, takes...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Human brands, Storytelling | Jan 22, 2015
In the Work of the Personal and the Intertwinement of Brand There is knowing and there is being. What do you know? And what do you — be? In the work of branding, looking for soul and truth, sometimes I feel like a kind of vampire hunter, looking for the real, the...
by Tim Girvin | Artists, Concepts, Cool People, Motion Pictures, Storytelling | Jan 20, 2015
The Waft and Weft of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar.” There is a story, then a story within the story, a story behind the story, and the story that you hold in your mind, wrists, fingertips. They weave. Or lips, in the love story that never ends, it keeps going on,...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Scent | Jan 15, 2015
Experience Design, Sensationalism and the Layering of Sensuality You’re a…sensualist? You = sybarite? –––– This from an emailing from the lexicographical modeling of Visual Thesaurus below, a word cartographic tool that plays to motion-mapping the interrelationships...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Scent, Trends | Jan 13, 2015
Perfume and Persona — the categorization of demography by scent. I heard this conversation about 10 years ago — one of those rare moments when you have a chance to listen in on people’s impressions of you. That’s happened a couple of times, and in both, it was a...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Places | Jan 8, 2015
“This is what I expect to pay.” Earlier in my life, during my entry into the Japanese market, I studied Japanese with an assistant professor of Asian Linguistic Studies from the University of Washington. He would come down, twice a week, for 2 hour speaking and study...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts | Jan 6, 2015
Brands that are deep. In my journeys in meeting with brand leadership around the world, I watch for telling signs — the tell of a brand might be: How does the leader talk to their colleagues? Humane, cordial, supportive? How old, or new, is this brand? Is there a...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Places, Scent | Dec 30, 2014
THE SMELL OF EXPERIENCE: THE HISTORY OF EMPIRE & THE DESIGN OF SENSATION I was talking to a friend and client about the notion of brand in sensationalism — the holism of experience strategy. That comes down to one point, a reflexive point — how big do you feel? We...
