But these are the basics: Struggling artists trying and failing to win over the New York art scene in the 1980s decide to identify all the things they hate most about contemporary art, politics and popular culture. The collect physical objects that represent all that they hate and put them all in a coffin. They then make a solemn procession to Central Park where they theatrically and publically burn the coffin and all its contents announcing ‘A Funeral for the Eighties’ and establishing themselves as the leaders of a new and unique form of performance art.

So let’s get straight to the business of hate.

Click here to print off and make the tools for your desktop demonstration

Now, cut out the shapes…

Fold the the dotted lines inwards and stick the tabs with tape or glue to make your mini coffin and two protest placards…

Now, take 5 minutes to write a list of all the things your brand, business or campaign brand really hates. Not disagrees with or dislikes but really passionately hates. Put your list in the coffin.

Now write in one line on each placard:
- What you stand against
- What you stand for

You need to spread the word about your protest, where are you going to publically burn it?

*Appropriate for desktop funeral demonstration purposes only. Do not set on fire without supervision from a health and safety officer. For public protest larger coffin may be required.*

Veronique Branquinho

Our Autumn/Winter Press launch brought together friends and fans of Camper keen to see the creations from our latest Together Project – our seasonal collaboration with a selection of talented industrial, product and fashion designers from across the globe. And as Liv and I sat at the end of the day she asked a how a brand like Camper, with its identity so deeply rooted in the ancient island culture of Mallorca, manages to carry the seeming contradiction that collaborations with futuristic and fantastical designers such as Bernhard Willhelm, Romain Kremer and Jaime Hayon present.

Maria Blaisse

While Veronique Branquinho’s timeless designs share Camper’s respect for traditional techniques and classic shapes and Maria Blaisse sculptural collection shares inspiration from nature’s own dramatic forms and fabrics, there is perhaps a seeming contradiction between the Camper brand identity and creations of Willhelm, Kremer and Hayon.

Romain Kremer

So we talked and Liv asked me to write some of it down. And I guess this is it.

The name Camper literally translates as peasant or country man. The first Camper shoe was inspired by the traditional homemade ‘peasant’ shoe where a simple leather upper is stitched to a tire sole. But while Camper’s origins, beliefs and culture are inextricably linked with its island history and tradition it is not a nostalgic brand. While Camper’s ‘Walk don’t Run’ attitude does celebrate a simple and slow approach to life it is not about looking back but really being here in the present. Just like the traditional island culture into which it was born, Camper a live and vibrant brand celebrating not only individual resourcefulness, ingenuity and imagination but community and collaboration and this is what the Together Project is all about.

Each designer is simply asked to contribute with the best of their creativity and experience a modern and original product, manufactured with the most capable manual labour and using the best components. That’s the brief. We are not prescriptive as we believe that genuine creative collaboration cannot be constrained.

Bernhard Willhelm

So yes, like Camper, these designers are prepared to walk their own independent path rather than run to keep up with disposable fashion world. Yes they share some of our own basic principles – an obsession with quality, attention to detail, and classic craftsmanship. But while Camper talks about the need to ‘Contact Earth’ these designers create concepts that sometimes seem out of another galaxy.

And we believe this is a good thing. By connecting the knowledge of the past and the energy of the present we can help bring to life ideas for the future. This is what the Together Project enables us to do. It’s about freedom of expression, non-conformity, craft, creativity and possibility. And while we celebrate the individual designers the project is really a celebration of collective craft, of collaboration itself.

Genuine collaboration is frightening for many brands and businesses – the fear of contradiction, of confusing the message, of ‘going off-brand’. But not for Camper.

For a shoe brand that sells shoes in packaging that reads ‘If you don’t need it don’t buy it’ and sells a Twins range that is deliberately a pair of odd shoes, challenging commercial convention and asking provocative questions is part of our culture. For a footwear brand that sees no reason why its beliefs and principles should only express themselves in shoes – but also through a chain of restaurants and hotels – consistency is not something we aspire to. Our founding beliefs remain the same but where those beliefs take us is an ongoing adventure.

Camper is a brand that is firmly rooted and is therefore able to reach confidently into unexplored territory. Knowing where you come from gives you a sense not just of place but of purpose and a perspective on the world. It enables you to meet others – very different from yourself – on common ground and connect not only through similarity but also difference.

Ruth Coughlan is Communications Manager at Camper, London.

To be ‘fair’ is to be free of self interest, bias or deception. In the context of trade then you would think fair trade would be free of these evils. Unfortunately it is not so and as Fairtrade – the organisation – has amply demonstrated, elements of the world’s trading systems are fundamentally unfair. It was not always so and I believe the solutions to the problem of unfair trade lie in learning from history and ethical behaviour.

I have devoted my life to tea; a passion that is now shared by my sons. As a family engaged in the business of growing, packing and marketing our own brand we have always understood that it is incumbent upon those that are blessed with success to share the benefits of their success with others who may not be so fortunate.

We never needed help in comprehending the basic concept that ‘business is a matter of human service’. Early on I did what I could within the modest scale of my fledgling business, to help my staff and their families. Today by the grace of God and the efforts of my staff and my family, our business has grown. It follows that my ethical obligation to share should grow in the same way.

A sea of acronyms, declarations and apparently well meaning organizations has arisen around the catch cry of fair trade. Yet, there is nothing complex about the concept of being fair that requires such extraordinary effort and analysis.

Organizations apparently committed to the cause of fairness in trade seem to be missing a fundamental point. In any context, human rights, worker welfare or social justice – whatever you wish to call it – cannot be assured solely by certification and the mountain of compliance documents that buyers heap on producers today. Fair trade is ultimately about the price that is paid to the producer for goods or services.

In the main, producers know their ethical obligations to their workers and, because they live among their workers and witness their socio-economic circumstances, they are more aware of that commitment than their Western customers. The main reason they default on their commitments is that they lack the means to do so because of unfair trade practices. It is not that their product does not generate enough money to fulfil this commitment, but that the money ends up in the wrong pockets. Certification and documentation cannot address that.

London was established as the tea centre of the world during the British Colonial time.  Tea produced in Ceylon, India and Africa, major producers at that time, was consigned to London for sale by auction. 

Several small and medium family companies were engaged in blending, packaging, branding and marketing tea in almost every country.  The families took pride in the quality of their tea and provided consumers a choice of good quality tea; they never competed on price but rather on quality.  They were able to maintain the high quality of their blends because they retained control of the processing and packaging.  Although this was not a truly or genuinely fair trade structure for the tea industry due to the control of value addition offshore, the producers did receive a fair price for their crop and, as a result, their workers were well looked after. Everybody in the supply chain was content. 

Early in my career I witnessed London as a terminal market where producers were not offered the best possible prices and it became the largest blending and marketing centre of the world. London was where the ‘value addition’ process took place for tea. Ceylon tea packed and exported from London formed the base of nearly every brand of tea. The situation continued for almost 30 years after Ceylon’s independence and emergence as Sri Lanka.

The success of the tea business attracted large trading companies, which set out to acquire all the small and medium sized companies, many of which were family owned.  Those that would not sell did not survive beyond the ensuing three or four years. 

Having acquired most of the small and medium sized companies’ businesses, the big traders – today’s multinationals – made tea a commodity.  That gave them the opportunity to compromise on quality and focus on cost cutting in their bid to profit from their acquisitions. Three or four big traders began to dominate the market. This changed the character of the tea business. Quality was no longer the measure of success. It was replaced by market power and the size of advertising budgets. Consumers were soon attracted by celebrities talking of their ‘favourite’ brand of tea. The quality of tea in the cup began its decline. 

This concentration of marketing power also resulted in concentration of sourcing power, buying tea from producing countries.  The control of sourcing and marketing by multinational traders opened tea producers to exploitation.  As quality lost its significance, price became the most important factor.  Competition in the market place disappeared and tea producers were driven to sell tea at whatever prices the big traders offered.  That is when ‘unfair trade’ strengthened its grip on tea.  

The colonial era was by no means fair, but what it evolved into was far worse. Having created unfairness, the very same brand owners are today resorting to pledge their support to one or more of the well meaning ‘Fair Trade’ organizations that have sprung up in response to the demand for some legitimizing body.

In many cases the result of the union of unfair brand with legitimizing organization operates on the principle of making the consumer feel guilty. There is some form of price premium that is demanded in return for a ‘fair’ product. That is surely unfair in itself, for is it not a simple and basic form of humanity that every product ought to be fair? The obligation to be fair lies very clearly with the brand owner. It cannot be delegated or passed on in any form.

Any premium paid by consumers actually strengthens today’s unfair trade. It is shared by all the middlemen, leaving very little- about 10% of that premium for the producer and how it reaches the farmer is not quite clear. The cure is worse than the disease! It enhances profits of middlemen. It reinforces the role of middlemen. It perpetuates the present unfair trade model.
 
The only profitable segments of the tea industry are value addition (packaging at origin), branding and marketing- which are mostly entrenched in the grip of multinational traders.
        
Ultimately the fairest form of trade is one in which the producer earns enough from his crop to attend to the welfare of the workers involved, secure the future of his or her industry and care for his family and possibly shareholders. There can be no substitute to this reality.

Packaging Dilmah tea in Sri Lanka and retaining branding and marketing control has enabled our family to provide consumers with the freshest and finest Single Origin Pure Ceylon tea and to retain all the profits in Sri Lanka. We share the profits with our workers, the wider community and reinvest in making tea a sustainable industry. This is ethical trade- the fairest trade of all.

Fair trade will become reality only when producers are empowered to add value, brand and market their tea without the intervention of traders. Anything short of that perpetuates unfair trade.

Please visit www.mjffoundation.org & www.dilmahconservation.org to see how we are making our business a matter of human service.

Merrill Fernando is the Founder of Dilmah Tea

Find out more about their campaign at www.pinkstinks.co.uk

http://www.iiamo.com

Still, I was skeptical about what appeared to be a “Happiness” cult being built, fittingly, just outside Vegas — close enough for the Trekkie conventions to organize day trips. “Happiness?” Really? I’ve been around enough corporate BS to merit a Haz Mat suit. So armed with my tazer, some handy wipes, and a BS detector, off we went to see for ourselves.

From the outside Zappos HQ is as non-descript as any other building on any other corporate park — no public displays of cultishness — but as soon as you find the lobby (which humbly refuses to yell out its whereabouts) you realize there’s a really interesting story being told here. There’s a dingy old stained sofa in the lobby, the very one that Tony Hsieh and original founder Nick Swinmurn would sleep on during the early days; a photo of the San Francisco Victorian that once housed it; a glass case containing the elusive size 11 Air Walk desert boots that inspired the venture, along with the original business plan for shoesite.com. Someone here definitely understands the power of the creation myth.

Next to the icons is a large bookshelf supporting CEO Tony Hsieh’s extensive collection of Must Read business books — Good to Great is among his favorites he’ll later tell me, his business built on tried and true learning from past masters. “Nothing new here” he seems to be saying, just the messianic application of the perennial wisdom of good business.

In the men’s room I see a series of cave paintings depicting the core values of Zappos. As I snap pictures a voice from the stall next door yells out “that shutter sound is making me really nervous!”

A tattooed member of the staff takes us on a tour. There’s a strong sense of certainty in the commentary. This man believes. Everyone we meet believes. This business is doing well. Everyone understands why it is doing well and how to keep it doing well. There is no doubt.

We pass more ‘cave paintings’ in the more familiar style of The Grove, mind-mapping more of Tony’s favorite books: Peak and Made to Stick. And then still more in the stairwells, this time staff graffiti in the doodling style of High School notebooks, proclaiming “We are all in the process of becoming. The ? is what?” next to “We love Zappotopia”.

Legendary customer service is the key to customer Happiness we’re told. The week-long recruiting/training process rigorously screens out those who don’t “get it” intuitively and those who don’t embody the 10 Zappos core values. The offer of $2,000 to walk away at the end of that week still doesn’t tempt many — it may have to go up again soon says Tony, not enough are walking. The lure of the cult is strong.

And its power is measurable. On the white boards we see the day’s sales numbers scrawled in green marker and how they track against plan. Underneath are the most recent Net Promoter Scores, all in the 90s. It’s this simple it all seems to say: Making them happy makes us money. And in that order. Another metric we learn about is the longest customer service call ever — over 5 hours — a piece of folklore they are fiercely proud of, part of the Bizarro world that is Zappos.

It’s hard to over-emphasize just how at odds that last notion is with the rest of the call center industry, who’s stated internal goals are precisely the opposite — how do we get them off the phone sooner and increase calls per hour further. They worship the god of efficiency, Zappos the god of Wow!

And Wow is applied to suppliers and vendors as much as customers. “You can’t believe how pleasant they are to work with,” says a quote from one supplier in Business Week. Wait a minute? Where’s the Chief Procurement Officer with her thumb screws.

After we pass the napping room and have our photos taken adorned in crown sitting on the Zappos thrown, it’s down to meet Tony Hsieh. He’s not at his cube — nestled inside the jungle area of the cube farm — but the opened can of Coke Zero suggests he’s not far away. When I meet him his low-key demeanor takes me aback. Eric Ryan had told me to expect this, but still, one expects the cult leader to be powerfully charismatic. It’s not that Tony doesn’t have a quiet power in his zen-like thoughtfulness, it’s just not what one has come to expect — corporate Titans that adorn business magazine covers have larger than life profiles. This is odd.

And fascinating.

However I ask my questions Tony’s answers circle back around to the Belief System of Zappos, its 10 core values. Sure, there was an opportunity in shoes back in the dot com heyday that no one else was exploring. But shoes are irrelevant to Tony. It’s about how Wow leads to happiness leads to business success — again, IN THAT ORDER. Once the values were codified and committed to they drove success in a manner that seems inevitable to Tony. “Because” I wanted him to say enigmatically, “it is written”. He stopped just short.

And lest you think it all cuddles at the Happiness Temple, Tony tells a story about his dismissal, after a long, long search, of a really hard to lure technical head just one week into the job after he’d refused to do the mandatory customer service training sessions. Those monks can be ruthless SOBs on the path to Happiness.

Tony’s book Delivering Happiness comes out next month (pre order it at Amazon). He gave me an advance copy and I have to say, it’s a very well told story, written entirely by the man himself – no ghost writers. What’s fascinating is to get not just a glimpse, but a pretty full-on view of the roots of his drive for Happiness, including — and one of the biggest surprises for me — the credit given to rave culture and his self-described “awakening” at one such event that he himself had organized. The book even has some fractal artwork! It took me back, man. And it sure made a change from the “hard scrabble” upbringing, tough-love stories of so many other self-made men.

Here’s a young man who made a ton of money early enough in life that he ended up asking the kind of big “what’s the point?” type of questions in his twenties rather than wait for the midlife crisis. And his Big Fish — the central challenge he has to face down — is Happiness, understanding what it is, how to get it, and how to hang on to it. That his route to Happiness should be a company selling shoes is almost incidental. Framed around Maslow’s hierarchy, for Tony, lasting happiness comes from being part of something bigger than oneself. He got to the top of the pyramid early and set about figuring out how to stay there and take as many people along with him as he could. This is his mission now, inspiring Happiness everywhere.

It’s a radical idea (if not a new one). To start with Happiness as the goal and build a business around it, rather than assume happiness results from business success, up-ends a lot of conventional thinking and why Tony Hsieh is so inherently a challenging figure. It’s business Jim, but not as we know it.

And it puts Tony in the vanguard of business writers trying to move the world in this direction. Both Seth Godin and Daniel Pink have addressed similar themes in Lynchpin and Drive, respectively. But Tony Hsieh’s multi-billion dollar business success makes the results of Happiness very tangible indeed. If more companies adopt his lessons then watch out world.

And then let’s all meet in Vegas for one huge rave.

P.L.U.R.

Mark

Mark Barden, West Coast Partner, eatbigfish

www.zappos.com

When we started researching and writing about Challengers 10 years ago it was fierce beliefs that armed the scrappy David against the highly polished brand image held by Goliath. But today, thanks to the success of those belief driven brands and the broader adoption of Challenger thinking, brand beliefs seem to be a new kind of corporate religion. And so of course there are those ‘Believers’ who simply recite the words, carry on with business as usual and repent when necessary and there are those whose commitment to their principles and convictions define and drive their every behaviour.

Together we’ve been trying to get beyond the words written on a lobby wall or on a website to understand the kinds of beliefs that drive decisions, that challenge and change behaviour, that matter not just to the people who wrote them in the brand book but to people in the real world outside. We are looking for sharpness, for brand beliefs with teeth. We’ve found a few but please do give us yours.

You can join in the daily conversation about this and other topics on the blog and if you want us to let you know when new interviews and articles go up on the Project then please just click here to join our mailing list.