by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Storytelling | Feb 24, 2015
The Deep Quest to Know a Brand Earlier in my life I was an inveterate spelunker, a cave explorer. In a manner, exploring caves is a richly metaphoric enterprise. You go deep into the heart of the earth, in winding, supremely dark and likely unknowable and risky...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Places | Feb 19, 2015
BRAND PRESENCE, PARTICIPATION AND SENSUAL DESIGN You’re here, right? That is: right now, you’re presenting, you’re present: you’re here? When you’re walking a space, trying to create a place — something unforgettable — you need to be in here. Present and focused,...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Cool People, Human brands, Storytelling | Feb 17, 2015
Brands, Dreams, Visions and Imagining It takes a special kind of person to run a brand. There will be fire found. In the near four decades of working experience, one comes to know what will work, and what will not, in the management of brand. One can have all the...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts | Feb 5, 2015
I LIKE TO BE TOUCHED. And I like to touch. Just one way to sense is to touch. In having a conversation with one, I find that a touch is a way to link to someone in a different way — it’s a bond that will take the track of a discussion from one tack to another. Touch —...
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 | 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 | 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...
