Crumpler Stands Apart
Maverick Australian bag company Crumpler regularly wins best stand at trade shows around the world, including this year’s Outdoor Retailer Winter show in the US.
For every trade show, Crumpler has one main objective for its stand: do something different. That approach has seen the Australian bag company on numerous occasions win best stand in show, including taking out Best of Booth (BOB) at the US Outdoor Retailer Winter trade show in January 2008.
The stand, designed by Crumpler’s in-house designer Joel Adams, was definitely different, even by this company’s irreverent standards. Previous stands have included chalkboards, an inflatable bag, temporary tattoos, antiquated typewriters for client orders and fluffy animals in cages. But this year’s stand saw Crumpler create its own world within a show; a 6x9 metre medium-density fibreboard (MDF) cityscape that, according to Adams, looked like a giant castle.
‘The entire outer perimeter was covered in images; there were banners and massive towers and huge fibreglass poles with mobiles floating in the middle of it all. We didn’t have our name clearly marked on the outside so it might have confused a few people – or even scared them! – but the reaction was mainly amazement. People would walk up and say what’s this? It was quite comical, with all these things hanging from the sky. People tried to steal bits and pieces of it, others wanted to buy the bits – we were almost going to start a furniture company!’
The stand was another triumph for the Crumpler design team, headed by Adams who has been with the company for three and a half years. He completed a Bachelor of Arts with a major in sculpture at Ballarat University, where he met his now employer Stuart Crumpler, chief bag designer and one of Crumpler’s founders.
Upon completing his degree, Adams put his design and sculpture skills to work in Melbourne, creating custom fit outs for various shops, and a bar he co-managed with friends. He started a postgraduate degree at Victoria College of the Arts in 2004 and one night bumped into Crumpler’s marketing manager, Dave Roper, at a Melbourne pub.
‘Dave said we were just talking about you!’ Adams remembers. ‘He said do you want a job and I said yes. I quit my course and I’ve been here ever since.’
The Crumpler philosophy
Unlike most businesses, Crumpler doesn’t have a strategic plan for their tradeshow displays. And that’s not surprising when you consider that this is a company that adorns its bags with names such as ‘Fux Deluxe’, ‘Seedy Three’, ‘Brazillian Dollar Home’ and ‘The High Net Worth Individual’.
Crumpler was established in 1995 by sculptor/furniture-maker and bike courier Stuart Crumpler, and two fellow bike couriers, Dave Roper and Will Miller. The three cycling delivery boys couldn’t find funky bags to carry their documents and packages so they decided to make their own. Their ‘messenger bags’ became so popular with bike couriers that Crumpler was born.
The company has diversified over the past 10 years and now makes photo, computer, travel and leisure bags, as well as a range of pouches and holders for devices such as mobile phones, MP3 players and electronic organisers. Crumpler has grown to become a global brand, split into two distinct entities, Crumpler Europe and Crumpler Australia. The Australian arm has responsibility for sales and marketing in Australasia, Asia and the US.
Crumpler’s brand management strategy consists of one overarching concern: if they like, they do it. With that in mind it has sponsored film festivals, BMX competitions – and holds its annual Beer for Bags campaign: people turn up at Crumpler outlets with beer and they receive bags in exchange. Revolutionary, but simple.
Crumpler Australia’s export sales are in the vicinity of $6 million, approximately 50 per cent of sales overall, and it has in the past three years launched retail stores in New York, Toronto, Manila and Singapore, with stores also mooted for San Francisco, Vancouver and Beijing. The company employs 22 full-time staff and approximately 55 casuals, all of who share the Crumpler philosophy: don’t take it all too seriously.
‘Other companies think about their perception and really do consider it, but I don’t think we take it all that seriously. We keep doing what we do – and we’re getting away with it at the moment,’ Adams laughed.
According to Adams many of their competitors at the Outdoor Retailer tradeshow had millions of dollars to spend on their booths. By comparison Crumpler’s budget had a ceiling of $50 thousand, with design accounting for approximately half of that. Despite the limitations, history shows that Crumpler won the award for best booth, and the company’s approach to designing and manufacturing its stand for the show was in keeping with its approach to its overall brand identity: if we like it, we’ll do it.
Crumpler makes a stand
Adams had for a long-time collected books displaying illustrations of M.C. Escher’s famous etchings. Early in 2007 he was reading a book called The Nuremberg Chronicles, which featured detailed drawings of towns and landscapes with a style not dissimilar to Escher’s. It gave Adams the idea for developing Crumpler’s city imagery for a future tradeshow.
There was, however, no timeline established. Although the company knew it had the Outdoor Retailer and MacWorld tradeshows to attend in January 2008, Adams was given time to percolate his idea in the hope that it would be ready for the tradeshow deadlines. He had the opportunity to play around with ideas and follow his own path until he came up with something that the rest of the team thought, yes, this is ‘something we would do’.
‘It took about 12 months,’ Adams said, adding that the project was also developed with Crumpler retail outlets in mind. ‘It had to also encompass all the shelving bits for them.’
After Adams had settled on the imagery and rough design for the stand’s MDF manufacture (which included a recycled rubber floor), regular Crumpler graphic designers Tin & Ed were called in to weave their magic. The pair put all the imagery together so that it would function and be effective across numerous panels.
‘The project was pretty much a half split between design and function,’ Adams said. ‘The function was trying to create the core units themselves and how it would work as one giant jigsaw puzzle that you could pull together quite quickly. You’ve only got 24 hours to set up your stand so we had to create something that didn’t involve screwing and nailing – all we had to take to set it up was a little hammer and a cordless drill.
‘The design part was all of the graphics, how they tied into each other, because once you started applying these graphics onto anything, and then started duplicating them, it almost became lost in itself, it almost became a kind of camouflage because there was so much detail going on that it was quite hard to pick it until you walked up close – and then you got to explore the design side.’
Adams said the most time consuming part of the design process was the prototyping. At this stage a team that included other Crumpler designers, CEO Stuart Crumpler, Dave Roper and Crumpler store managers was involved in ensuring the design met its requirements for functionality.
‘Because there were so many units, in the end there was always something missed so we had to keep going back and forth on the prototyping and that caused a lot of delays and issues. Finding the right materials was also an issue that caused headaches.’
Adams said that during prototyping a shop manager might come and suggest units needed to be taller, Stuart Crumpler would shake it and say it needed strengthening – and then it was back to the drawing board. He said that although the stand ended up quite heavy – requiring manufacture of a set of custom transportation units – it could have been worse.
‘It started as this really heavy thing but evolved in the prototyping from 16mm to pretty well all 12mm – and that was good, to reduce weight and material costs. Some good ideas got culled because there were so many bits and pieces. We started out just thinking about retail stores for the units so it started out as this simple modular system with minimal parts that you could put together quickly and easily. But once the tradeshow side of it came in, I knew we usually like to enclose our area, so we had to find a way to build an almost tent-like structure without a roof.’
Adams said that as a direct result of the company’s experience on the project, it purchased its own C&C (cutting machine).
‘You draw the image and then you can cut it out; we can do a lot of stuff in house now and do a lot of that early prototyping and save a lot of time.’
A stand that stood apart
Eventually the deadline for the tradeshow arrived and Crumpler found that its stand was ready. Well, almost. It had never been set up in its entirety so a time-honoured strategy was brought into play – hope for the best.
Fortunately, the strategy worked: the stand was constructed on time and without a glitch at its first stop, MacWorld tradeshow, San Francisco. Attendees gasped, questioned what they were seeing and then entered Crumpler’s city to discover the residents within: Crumpler’s new range of bags. When the show was over, the stand’s heaviness really came back to bite: the unit had to be packed and delivered to Outdoor Retailer Winter, Salt Lake City, in three days.
‘It is a very heavy booth; we carried it around the States in its road cases, a couple of tonnes in weight, and those containers got pretty bashed up in the end.’
Adams said that even though the materials used weren’t the most environmentally friendly available (budget and usability stymied their forays into more sustainable materials), the stand would last longer than others the company had created.
‘This one will last quite a while,’ he said. ‘Even if it gets damaged all you need to do is clean it up with a black texta, so I think what we’re hoping to do is use it a bit longer than other stands.’
He said he wanted, for sustainability purposes, to create the unit in cardboard, but finding a manufacturer to partner with was difficult.
‘Because of the life we wanted out of it, they were always finding a reason why they couldn’t do it. I am having that problem with current projects as well. The manufacturers we’ve had have been good, but I’m always looking for good manufacturers. On projects like this stand, which is outside the box, we need manufacturers who are prepared to move beyond the methods they know.’
Although Crumpler might seem relaxed in its approach, it sets high quality standards for its ingenious and intriguing approach to production and marketing. Adams said the US trade show stand stood out from the crowd because of a number of factors.
‘Shock value and surprise – and it was quite a beautiful set of images in the end. When you came and saw the whole booth together it really worked well; the flooring, the images, the banners the mobiles in the sky, everything tied in really well and it was almost like an art installation; the fact that we were selling bags was almost funny. It could have sat in a gallery.’
Adams said the attention the stand received in shows that had enormous numbers through the doors was invaluable. At the same time he said there was a direct link between sales and having an outstanding trade show presence. It has brought in new business, crucial at a time when Crumpler is establishing new US retail outlets.
‘The stand had a really good response. We outdo these amazing booths that have millions of dollars spent on them. We get a lot of publicity because we stand out from the crowd.’
Click here to download the Crumpler case study.
Related Links
Crumpler — www.crumpler.com.au
US Outdoor Retailer Winter Trade Show — www.outdoorretailer.com
MacWorld Tradeshow — www.macworldexpo.com
8 December 2008