Applied Series: Creating Digital Storytelling Magic for Luxury Fashion with Holition's CEO Jonathan Chippindale

Turning Ideas into Fashion Storytelling Diamonds
Jonathan Chippindale made his luxury marketing name in the world of fine jewellery at De Beers prior to launching his creative tech studio, Holition.  The magnetic pull of Jonathan's "Willy Wonka-esque" genius, has allowed him to tap into the transformative power of digital storytelling in the luxury space. His philosophy of 'human connections first, technology second' champions  Holition's digital campaigns that tug at the heartstrings. In this episode, host Peter Jeun Ho Tsang delves into how Jonathan creates these beautiful fashion campaigns for some of the world's biggest brands.

Using Creative Technologies Effectively
Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Tommy Hilfiger, Dunhill, Burberry, the list goes on. Holition's client list is not only impressive, but are willing to take technological leaps of faith with Jonathan and his team when it comes to crafting their digital marketing campaigns.  In this episode we gain insight as to how he manage to convince the brands to take this leap with him, the mega trends that are shaping the fashion marketing industry, and why Jonathan believes that technology should be an invisible thread in any campaign. With all this in mind, Holition breathes life into fashion narratives, and dreams up projects like the Tommy Hilfiger & Roblox Sep 2022 fashion show; becoming vital reference points in the ever-evolving landscape of fashion tech.

Jonathan and Holition are featured in chapter 4 of the book Fashion Tech Applied.  Check it out.

Find out about Holition here.
Connect with Jonathan in LinkedIn.

*EXCLUSIVE OFFER* -20% discount for podcast listeners on the printed or ebook of Fashion Tech Applied. Purchase your copy at Springer here using the discount code*: 08cWPRlx1J7prE

*Offer ends end June 2024

Transcript

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 0:03

Fashion Tech Applied is published, my co-authored book taking you through six chapters and covering the technologies and innovations powering the fashion industry. I'm Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, founder and CEO of Beyond Form, and welcome to the special podcast series applied. Each episode, I'll be sitting down with incredible fashion tech professionals that are featured inside the book. On today's episode, I'm sitting down with Jonathan Chippindale, CEO of Holition, a creative studio dreaming of some of the most beautiful digital campaigns for the world's most famous luxury brands. I've known Jonathan for over a decade, which means in that timeline I've also seen how his studio has evolved creatively as the technology advanced. If you've ever stepped into his office, you'll understand why some people might call him the Willy Wonka of digital marketing campaigns. In featured in chapter four of the book, we delve really deep into what makes Jonathan tick and how he manages to create visual to the point where people weep.

Jonthan Chippindale: 1:00

It was the music that made it moving, it was the non-tech bit that made it moving. Don't try and reduce our chance to tears it does happen from time to time. But it was lovely, it was really nice and it was in exactly the right kind of way. We'd trigger something within us. So the first aid was like to slow everything down. And if everything about fashion shows are about hype and movement, slow that down. The fashion goes down, the fashion comes back again and that's it.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 1:23

You just don't see it. So let's get started with the conversation with Jonathan on this episode of Venturing into Fashion Tech. How are you today, Jonathan?

Jonthan Chippindale: 1:31

Ah well, I'm not feeling amazing since you've got the dreaded COVID, but I'm pushing my way through it. We're gonna be fine. Positive mental action is gonna carry me through this interview Well thank you so much for taking your time out.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 1:43

I'm gonna start the episode by giving some context and setting the scene for our listeners. So we're talking about halation and we're talking about digital marketing and digital activations Joffy did in chapter four of the book. I've known you for quite a long time now, Jonathan I think over 10 years so I followed Halish's journey.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 2:03

Yeah, exactly you followed my journey and we're still here basically battling it out in the entrepreneurship, business world, basically, but we haven't actually done anything publicly together before. No, I'm glad that we're putting that right Exactly, and now we get to share what normally good is within the confines of the halation office and brainstorming and chitchat, but now we're making that public essentially. But let me say this at the scene so 71% of fashion executives plan to spend more on brand marketing in 2024 than in previous years, and that's according to the BOF State of Fashion report that was released at the end of 2023. It goes on to say that consumers expect to see brand stories that are consistent and authentic, and I think that halation is one of the very few agencies that do this exceptionally well creating authentic stories.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 3:06

You work with specifically, or some of most of your guys are quite high in luxury brands, and luxury brands are spending 33% of their advertising budgets on digital marketing, according to Gartner, so that's quite a high number. The world's top luxury groups LVMH, coty and Keering Group spent, or spent rather, 6.69 billion US dollars on ads in 2020, according to Satista. Creating visually beautiful ads that are mostly engaged with the consumer is key to seeing a positive ROI on all of that ad spend. This is where halation comes in, and you are one of the masters of that, yourself and your team. Shall we say? I was reading, actually, your bio on the University of the Arts London website because you have an honorary doctorate. When did you get that? I didn't realize you had one of those actually.

Jonthan Chippindale: 4:04

I know, I must say when I got a letter from the Vice Chancellor saying that they very kindly awarded me an honorary doctorate for well, I mean I'm blushing Even to say it, but I mean for an outstanding contribution to the world of digital return and fashion, I assumed it was one of my. It was a practical joke from one of my team and it wouldn't have surprised me. I had to check the diary and make sure they wasn't April the first. But we've done lots of work with London Chloro-Fashion over the years and in fact just working with universities has been very, very important for us. It's been very important part of our journey and it's been two-way traffic. I mean, on the one hand it's, you know a lot of my team come from, come straight from university and that might mean they come from UCL, you know, in their late 20s, with a PhD in computing science. Or they may come age 22 with an MA in fashion psychology for London Chloro-Fashion or narrative environments, from Central St Martin's. But but there are a lot of them start from university and that's because we we talk a lot at university and talk with university students. And I think the other thing that I find fantastic about talking to students and working with students and is like, quite early on and this is going to sound really rather arrogant and silly, but but quite early on, having come from luxury myself and that was where I started I was very keen that that it was critical that I would not employ anybody that has spent considerable time in luxury, fashion or beauty, and one of the reasons for that is that, you know, having come from luxury, there's a in many brands and I don't think it's quite the same now. I think digital has kind of unlocked a lot more sort of positivity and and openness and interest in it, exploring new, new areas.

Jonthan Chippindale: 5:52

But when I was in luxury, you know, no one ever got fired for saying no. Everyone people only got fired for saying yes and and there was a definite feeling of inertia and not wanting to put your head above the parapet and not wanting to take too much risk. And you know what we do at Halish and is all about risk and trying to have an understanding about where our brand's appreciation for risk lies and and to but ideas right up on that spot and and even to go beyond that and then courage brands to kind of go into slightly unknown areas, and I didn't really want anybody in the team that had had a whole career of being kind of indoctrinated into saying no. So what's great about you know the people that work at Halish and is not having come from that corporate world, they don't have those inhibitions and they can. You know, I love that magic moment of serendipity when we get a brief from Chanel. I can throw it into a rug with a mathematician, a psychologist and a filmmaker and what comes out is often wrong because they don't understand necessarily the kind of limitations or the environment of that luxury brand. But it's unusual and it's different and then with my luxury experience I can then fine tune it and bring it into a kind of area which I think sits on where that kind of particular brand's exceptions of innovation lies.

Jonthan Chippindale: 7:07

So what's great about working with universities and working with students is that you just get this openness and this kind of willingness to kind of explore and also what you get is real relevancy, because you know I'm in my fifties now and you know my generation's looking at retirement, I mean I've got huge amounts of experience.

Jonthan Chippindale: 7:29

I think I've got the experience, but I think my team's got the relevance and, like, relevance is really important. Obviously it's really important. It's particularly important now with the predomination of social media around the and the speed of change and the speed of innovation. You know, having people living and breathing that innovation as individuals, as as members of my team, kind of outside of tradition, means that actually, when it comes to thinking about some of those projects that you were referring to, peter, that we do it means that we understand the tools and and how those tools are changing and and what is absolutely on the zeitgeist of today. And again, you know, working with younger people that kind of are digitally native and sort of understand these tools is a real, just a real powerful driver of innovation and change and kind of freedom of thought.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 8:15

When did you actually get the? But that's not the question you asked me, but that's fine. When did you actually get the honorary doctorate? I didn't realise. Actually you received one, I know it happens it must have.

Jonthan Chippindale: 8:27

It was before the pandemic, so about four or five years ago, yeah, and yeah, I had to make the speech at the Royal Festival Hall and actually what was really nice is in January I was asked to be part of a UK trade delegation by the UK government to New York and it ended up in a in a. The very last night there had a sort of cocktail sort of party at the residence of the consulate, where she's looked at the very top of a tower looking out over the UN in New York and over the Hudson River, and there was a startup that is doing very, very well, has raised quite a lot of money, and they. They do virtual spaces for retail stores, and I was having a chat to the, to the, to the founder of it, and, and she said she was one of the students that heard me speak when I received my doctorate. She was receiving her degree and she was. She was there with her parents in the festival hall hearing Jonathan's apparent words of wisdom On the university's website.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 9:27

They do describe you as the Willy Wonka and I think you mentioned it there as about taking people out of their comfort zones. It's about taking risk. As we all know the story of China top-notch factory that is essentially what he is doing. So you, jonathan, as the Willy Wonka of digital technologies and fashion and just marketing. You know you have helped shape some of the world's oldest and largest luxury brands and how they use technology to tell you are saying their relevant stories to the consumer. But I want to know about you how did you reach that stage? How did you become the Willy Wonka of technology and, specifically, digital?

Jonthan Chippindale: 10:05

marketing. Well, first of all, on the Willy Wonka thing, I mean when we started I'm not even sure how old the condition is anymore, I can't remember when I started it up, but I mean it's sort of six, 17 years ago now. And when we started we were one of the very, very, very first sort of UK fashion tech, retail tech startups. There were one or two others that I can't remember who they were and they're not around anymore, and so we were really very much a sort of early start, and being early means that everything that you do happens to be a world first and happens to be and if it's digital, in a world where no one really got digital. And, just to be clear, most of the trends that we work with in those days, many of them didn't even have a website. And if they did have a website, it was more about the location of the stalls and the opening hours and the telephone numbers and how to get there. It wasn't about all the stuff that we talk about now.

Jonthan Chippindale: 10:59

So a lot of these brands were very sort of backward thinking, not so much now but definitely then. So everything that we were doing was kind of unusual and mad and crazy and using technology to wear things, using augmented reality, doing fashion shows, using holography, creating three autostereoscopic 3D visual and virtualizing windows for brands. Everything felt really different and unusual and that's where that rather embarrassing comment came from. And particularly, we'd just done a piece of work with Ames where we had created a series of clothes that changed color according to the air quality that you walk through and every item of clothing reported back to the brand every three hours with the location of the product and the color and therefore we were able to map a city. And that idea was so sort of unusual that I think that's where that Willy Wonka thing came from, because we were and it goes back to what you were talking about right at the beginning of this, peter, because I'm a classically trained analog luxury marketing director and that was my first 25 years or 20 years or whatever it was before hellish and marketing. It's all about sort of understanding human behavior and using those insights to tell stories, because what is a brand if it's not a collection of stories? And in the analog world the stories were about products and logo and color and store and history and heritage and of course in today's world you can add to that, you know conversations around culture and politics and environment and sustainability and art, and you know personality and just the level of stories are also completely different and can vary.

Jonthan Chippindale: 12:34

So when we started Illishon, rather than think about technology and it's still very much the way that we work now we're kind of technology last, we're sort of I mean, we're sometimes called anti technology technologists because it's never about the technology. What we try and do is understand the consumer, because that's like the first rule of marketing who is your consumer? Who are you talking to? What are their motivations? Who is the brand? What is the brand? What are what is that brand's personality? How does that brand differentiate from its competition? Where are the interesting areas of exploration and discovery for that brand?

Jonthan Chippindale: 13:08

So, thinking strategically but then very quickly thinking creatively about how to deliver that opportunity, and what we found over the years is that if you think strategically and then creatively, the right technology starts to let sit self. There were technology last, and I think that notion of thinking creatively but not thinking, but using technology to amplify creative thought and creative thinking basically means that at the heart of it, illishon, we create narratives, we are storytellers, and it is not the technology, it's a story that you tell. Using that technology and we often talk about the notion of like you can have the world's most expensive high quality television, but if you're watching bad content, your experiences poor. You know, likewise, on your mobile phone you could watch a great old classic black and white film, you know, casablanca or something, and it's a really great story, really beautifully told and well acted, and you can still have a great experience. So really early on, we sort of, when we're not about the technology, the technology with a tool, in some ways denigrate the technology, hide it away so that the story is not about VR or AI or AR or whatever it is. That kind of terminology just made our hearts sink, you know, to the bottom of the earth. We just felt that's not, that's not who we are as humans. Like, I'm not interested in AR, but I'm very interested in how AR can can tell stories. And then what are those stories?

Jonthan Chippindale: 14:32

And then, particularly for us, we're just very, very interested in stories that that in some ways kind of help you understand more about yourself or what it's like to be human or what is your role in the world or in the ecosystem within which you can operate. Things that kind of help that give you insights, I think, are very much kind of an area of interest and and you know those insights, even though they have a fashion element or a luxury element or a beauty element. Those insights can be around climate change or refugees, or dementia or mental health, or, you know, these are all projects that we've done. I mean, even you know things around Afghanistan and Iraq or genocide in Rwanda. You know, we've, we've we kind of work in these areas where we should really important to us as human beings, and I think that that is one aspect that differentiates lots of our work. I mean, yes, we do, you know things that sell handbags and things that sell more lipsticks, but but in another class of work we do again in the in the fashion space, but but sort of talks about bigger things, and it just plays that idea we were referring to about five or 10 minutes ago, which is that storytelling and kind of brands.

Jonthan Chippindale: 15:51

We feel look at brands now as having much more elastic identities. They're not rigid, you know they. They can talk about one thing one day, a different thing another day. They can have a view on Black Lives Matter, they can have a view on climate change. You know, they're sort of like humans, right? We all have different levels of understanding and different interests and different loves, and you know we are wonderfully individual, all of us. You know we're all fundamentally different people.

Jonthan Chippindale: 16:16

I think the bit I found really interesting are that with those brands that again are not, are becoming much more nebulous and much more amorphous and have got different stories for different types of customers and therefore the brand is different.

Jonthan Chippindale: 16:30

I've always reminded of of, of the teachers that I kind of value when I was a kid, are the ones that encouraged me to find out for myself rather than tell me what to think. And I think you know, as an analog marketing director, in the old days, in the pre digital days, we used to tell people what to think. We created brand worlds, we told women what to wear and how to wear it, before they even knew it themselves, or so we liked, liked to kid ourselves that we believed, but but actually nowadays that just sounds crass, right, and actually brands are about everything that. It's about everything else beyond the product that makes those brands interesting. We want to be surprised and, by the way, fashion is all about surprising, right? Like fashion is always about nudists and what's different. And and you know I wasn't expecting that and and wow, they've got a really interesting point. So again, that that sort of slightly, that's that degree of nebulosity around the brand in its communication. It's absolutely what they should be looking at.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 17:42

Just for the context of our listeners. How do you describe, then hellish? Because you are telling stories, you're using technology, you are digital, you are marketing. So how do you encapsulate all of that into hellish?

Jonthan Chippindale: 17:52

One of the things I thought was fascinating for me, one of my sort of learnings as I started all of this was again coming from a brand, particularly as a strategic marketing director. It was all about control and it was all about thinking quite heavily and seriously about the right move Before you take a step forward. You recognize the ground, you check your direction, you, you know, you research, you talk and by the time you finally put that foot down, you're comfortable that you're heading in the right direction. When I started this and I very quickly realized that actually my ability to control the world around me was less than zero, quite frankly, there was, you know, we had ideas, but clients had different ideas. The economics and the environment that we did, which we operated in, were different ideas, consumers had different ideas and therefore we didn't really have any sort of ability there. So so we've tried to weaponize that, I guess, into some kind of superpower. So the answer to your question, peter, is we deliberately don't define ourselves in any way and we talk about the fact that technology is still changing and adapting and modifying and, by the way, the stories that are relevant, they're still changing, they're constantly evolving. I mean, you know, a few years ago we were doing lots of stories about diversity and for that we were doing stories about climate change, and before that we were doing stories about diversity and, and you know, we we want to be free and un and untethered from kind of like where everybody else is talking about. We want to be able to be in the agile and talk about tomorrow's stories. Some people call us creative technologists, and I can get that, because pollution definitely operates at that junction, that intersection where kind of science meets art, that kind of cultural middle bit there. That's I, and what I mean by that is like harnessing harnessing science, harnessing art, but using that to tell a cultural story. That that's definitely something in that area of of luxury, fashion and beauty. But I think we're also in some ways, a practice based consultancy, Because a lot of what we try and do is think about not like VR and AR and tech, as I mentioned, but actually what are the future, what are the future direction?

Jonthan Chippindale: 20:10

So I mean there's been a lot of conversation around Apple's new headset, the pro. Whether you like it or not, it's the very, very, very worst Apple headset that will ever be made, because the next one will be better and the next one will be better and the next one will be better. If you can think into the future and think about the role of technology and the power of technology into the future, then then actually a very important thing happens. You can think about the importance of that technology without being hindered by the kind of, by the inadequacies of the hardware, because hardware gets better and technologies get better. It's one of the biggest issues that I think our clients struggle with. Our clients want a piece of technology and they want it perfect from day one. But that's not technology. That's not how technology works. If you look at the first car, the first airplane, the first computer, the first television, the first mobile, it gets better and better and better over the years. But I think a lot of retailers think of it like a handbag or a shoe. I need to make it as perfect as possible and then I can sell it, because I'm all about kind of quality.

Jonthan Chippindale: 21:12

So thinking about kind of technology in five years time or 10 years time is kind of again what we do. And then the projects that we do, they're like little steps of exploration and discovery on those particular routes and we look at the world over four kind of core, what we at LiturKore call bigger trends. Right, they all rumbly and we sort of map and track and deliver technology down these kind of four trends. One of them is around metahuman and that idea of you know avatars and our future self and thinking about how humans have kind of core needs in the real world. You know there are a number of different ways to explain core needs, but at a really simple level. You know we all need to acquire, you know, items, artifacts, knowledge, skills. We need to explore, see new worlds, see what's over there, you know, climb the mountain because it's there, you know, go to new places and have new experiences. We need to play, which is, we need to be entertained, and we need and we need to connect. You know, we need to feel like we're part of something bigger and we're not isolated and lonely and don't know how to run. But actually we have that empathy and that support from other people and we're quite interested in in what that means in the real world, but also in the digital world and how those two worlds connect, which feeds into the second ectrem, which is about hydrate worlds and again, the real world and the digital world, again, but thinking about the real and the digital together, not not in isolation, but together.

Jonthan Chippindale: 22:41

And how do I, how do I behave in the digital world? Is the digital world an extension of my real world or with a completely new space that I can? I can be a different person, I can be a different personality, and then, if I am that different personality, when I come back into the real world, that some of that digital element come back with me. I just think those things are interesting. Like it's interesting that in fortnight, you know something like nine to 10% of all people play the different gender. Now, a lot of that is women, famous men, because they don't want to be hassled. It's just that idea of like. Is a digital space something new for us, or is it? Is it a reflection of the real world or is it a completely new exploration space? And then again, what does that mean? And we're seeing lots of that in the beauty space, for example, where, where people are creating fantastical makeup looks that have to adhere to the law of gravity and just extraordinary in the digital space, but then they're now trying to bring those back and recreate them in actuality.

Jonthan Chippindale: 23:38

There's another one around the artifacts that we will use in the digital world.

Jonthan Chippindale: 23:43

So the final one is how will we control this?

Jonthan Chippindale: 23:46

And by control I don't be in a kind of legal or moral sense, but I mean, you know, kind of just an actual management way.

Jonthan Chippindale: 23:53

You know that idea of computing used to be something that we do on laptops, but it's gravitating into into our hands in terms of mobile phones, and our wrists in terms of smart phone, smart watches, and into the fabric of our clothing through flexible computing and brain computing, intubio.

Jonthan Chippindale: 24:11

When asked when, when the power of the phone, you know we can wear it on our, on our faces, but it looks fashionable, it's something that will be Parker sells and it doesn't look funky and it's. It just folds and hides itself into the fabric of our being. How will we control it in a world where we're used to typing, clicking and dragging and you kind of start thinking well, more human types of interfaces are kind of where we want to be going to talk and gesture and predetermined. You know AI and and emotion tracking and things around that. So, again, those are also quite a lot of interesting projects that that we do, where we try and think about the world without screens and the world without keyboards. That's a long, very long-winded way of saying that you don't find yourself. Basically. We just basically fit ourselves into whatever show we feel need to be in to deliver that particular piece of work in that particular way.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 25:08

And I quite, I know, quite like that. The fact that you don't define yourselves, because I think fashion people and fashion brands like to put other brands and other people in boxes and the fact that you don't fit within that box is quite interesting. I've always remembered coming to your office over 10 years ago now and you throw back to that notion of being in you know, the chocolate factory For our listeners. You have to imagine going into Jonathan's office, where his team are as well, and I just remember on the left hand side there was this massive lacost like fake shoe on the wall. I think at the time you were looking at projection mapping and you're like you know, peter, come over here. And then you were showing me all of a sudden this Louis Vuitton table that was for Selfridges and you were doing stuff with NFC chips and digital screens. And another side, you were showing me this very first beginnings of holograms, and everywhere I was turning in the office there was something completely different which I think encapsulates how you work as, I guess, as the leader of the company and your team, but the fact that you're also looking at all of these different perspectives and seeing which one is going to work. And then how can you then be that work for the fashion brands specifically, which, of course, is very exciting.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 26:21

And in the book you're featured in chapter four of fashion tech applied, which is, of course, about marketing. And in the interview you talked about, actually, the fashion show that you did for Dunhill, and the thing that really stood out to me is the fact that you described how a spectator, a woman, was sat next to you and because the show that your team had put on was so moving and it was so visually beautiful that she was quietly weeping from all of these emotions that she was feeling. And going back to your earlier point, the fact that it is the consumer, it is about the viewer that comes first in any of your projects, regardless if it's tech enabled or not, is very, very powerful. So how do you come up with such powerful concepts and to be able to draw a physical emotion from the viewer?

Jonthan Chippindale: 27:11

Yeah, that was. I mean, that's an awesome old project now it must be sort of nine or 10 years old but the starting point was basically listing out everything that a fashion show was at that point and then trying to do the opposite. So you know if you took a being very unfair to Victoria's secrets, but just grab it, you know that idea of light and movement and models marching down runways and a spectacle and a show and want to do the opposite. So the first thing that we wanted to do and, by the way, the crying was I mean, we don't try and reduce our class to tears, it does happen from time to time but as a woman crying but it was lovely, it was really nice and it was in exactly the right kind of way we'd triggered something within her. So the first thing was like to slow everything down and if everything about fashion shows are about hype and movement, slow that down. The second thing that we really wanted to do was was that recognition that the runway itself means that fashion goes down, it turns, fashion comes back again and that's it. You just don't see it. So that then led us to think right, well, let's have the models on the stage all the time. Let's just have them there so you can really see them. That then led to well, if they're on the stage, what's the earth are we doing and how are we showing? How are we doing a show?

Jonthan Chippindale: 28:35

And that then led on to the notion of holography, because we were then thinking about this notion of. We've got this classic English brand. They're in Shanghai. China's a very big market for Dunhill. Why do we? Can we drop a piece of? Can we have this idea of like dropping a little piece of England into the heart of Shanghai? And then we started to think about these seasons and spring, summer, autumn and winter. And we started to think about very classic sort of English music which were for Williams and a really great violinist, charlie, played this very beautiful sort of English music. But then, to make it more contemporary, can we then flip it so that it feels more Chinese by the end of it? And the last piece of? So the actual question is music. So we created this great show and we created this incredible holographic display and you would have looked at it and just gone well, that's clever, that's.

Jonthan Chippindale: 29:29

But what we then did was with the music. It was the music that made it moving. It was that little it was. It was the non tech bit that made it moving. We were also doing other night. Things like some of my team were like throwing the scent of cut grass into the air and the smell of sort of wet leaves into the air and that kind of thing just to kind of again get people thinking about the sort of just to immerse you in there. But but what I remember about that piece was that what triggered that emotion with the music? It wasn't the tech and it just reinforced our view that if we're going to show tech, it needs to be ensemble with lots of other things, with stories, with place. And I'll give you another example.

Jonthan Chippindale: 30:14

We did a, we're doing a piece of work for that great American artist, jenny Holzer, who's just one of our favorite superstars, and we were doing a project at Blenheim Palace and she was talking about people who had survived Iran and Afghanistan civilians, soldiers, very traumatic, very, very traumatic. And it was projected all over the outside of Blenheim. It's a piece of art and at the dinner a lot of people that collect art will all flown in the kind of art world was flown in to have dinner at Blenheim and to see all the pieces and there was exhibits everywhere, but the projections were the centerpiece and at the table that I was at they were sort of four or five American businessmen and an unbent route here. But there was a very worst of humanity in my experience because they were all talking about their deals, how much money they'll make. Everything was about money and it's like you know, I made more money than you and I hear bloody, bloody.

Jonthan Chippindale: 31:11

There's a lot of that going on and they kept saying to the waiter, waiter, we've got a flight to catch when, the when the projection's coming. I want to see the projection. That's why I'm here, I want to see the projections. And the waiter was saying it's got to be dark, it's not there yet, and every 10 minutes are they are, they are. And finally they were up, dinner hadn't finished but they all shot off to have a look at the projections and they came back 20 minutes later and they were different.

Jonthan Chippindale: 31:38

They, you know Jenny's art had changed them. They were thoughtful, they'd got it, and it's that. And what Jenny does so well, and hopefully with us too, is is she had used technology, not not to mitigate the harshness of her communication, but but to allow people to draw near and and to, and to read and to see and and to understand the horrors that were projected in huge letters all over the walls of this castle. But she'd used art to allow people to get near it and to get the message without being repelled or repulsed or patronized or torched to, and I just hope that that's kind of one of the things that we do as well, and and it none of that had been, you know, they had rediscovered what it meant to be human, and if we can do a little bit of that without with our work too, then I think we're we're getting into interesting places.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 32:31

It's quite often on our podcast, because we are interviewing more of the tech heavy companies is that quite often we don't have the discussion about actually texts, only to sit within the physical world, shall we say, and it's about how you use that technology to do something within the physicalities of you know, human life, some of the other brands that you have, where we talked about Dunhill there, but you've also worked with Hermes, louis Vuitton, tiffany, montclair, and the list goes on and on. You have some of the world's luxury powerhouses in your office. How do you approach like working with these? Because they're not, as you said earlier, they're not easy necessaries to work with. How do you not Just come best with them being so difficult sometimes?

Jonthan Chippindale: 33:26

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it's a really, really good question. I mean there are a couple of what's possible. They're all different, so we need to recognize that they're all different. And and again, that notion of here's my piece of tech and I'm going to keep pushing it at you, whether you like it or not when the antithesis of that? So there are a couple of things. One is Rather bizarrely, I very, very rarely ever show up projects to new clients.

Jonthan Chippindale: 33:52

I very, very rarely do it. And one of the reasons why I rarely do it is I always feel it's a bit like looking at photographs of other people's children. Like you, as parents, are deeply proud, but to everyone else is just another little kid right, just another baby, and all babies look alike. And all the projects that we do we have very, very carefully and painstakingly crafted and curated them For that particular need. And actually, you know, another client would have a completely different need and wouldn't understand anyway. So we often don't show our work, which is slightly in sort of unintuitive, not intuitive, but it just seems to work. And then the other thing is, all of our best projects start from conversations like we're having now. Right, we just sit and we talk and, and I think what happens is that it's a brand One. They feel that they can trust us because we understand luxury and all of those names that you've got. We understand, I mean. I think we understand the space, maybe not perfectly, but we understand it in the way that we understand it, and it's not like we're just a tech company that's doing work with a Lego, marvel, whatever you know. We really understand the importance of quality or storytelling, of narrative. We get what these brands are trying to do and and therefore we're a safe pair of hands. But but I think also that that you know a lot of the projects that we're most proud of. They didn't necessarily come with a brief right. They just came with a desire from a brand to just explore.

Jonthan Chippindale: 35:26

And when we were very lucky to do Tommy Hilfiger's fashion show at New York Fashion Week about a year and a half ago, and when I met the brand officer, it was basically it was a pitch. But it wasn't a pitch. It was a kind of a call with her and her team and a competitor just just to see whether they liked us, whether they felt they could work with us, and one of the questions apparently what. What swung it, I heard later, is I was asked what does a good project look like? And I always feel that a good project is with one where everybody learns, where we learn just as much as the brand learns. It isn't like a brand saying here's, here's what I want you to do, off, you go and do it.

Jonthan Chippindale: 36:13

Actually, these projects are a relationship and and in all good relationships, you give something and you get something back, and both parties need to do that. Both parties need to come away thinking actually, my life has been enriched and we definitely, from the best projects, get, definitely we learn about the brand, we learn about insights into, into how they operate, we learn of, we just you know, we learn about just you know. As long as you can try and keep that notion of of, yeah, new information, new insights, then I think everything works really really well and and and was fortunate in that we're able to communicate that to brands and I hope that they feel inspired by the way that we think, and that's what it's about. Do they think they could work with us? Will it be an interesting journey? Are we nice people? Are we efficient people? Do we challenge, do we do inspire? And if you and it's the answers to some of those questions of yes or ticks in boxes, then maybe we could do this in some way for you and and then we start with a blank sheet of paper.

Jonthan Chippindale: 37:19

I mean it's a terrible commercial. You know way of working. You know there's very little make it work. I mean it's you make it work, we will. I mean yeah, I mean I'm feeling old. Maybe that's, maybe that's a COVID.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 37:37

But I think that's really important though, because quite often, I get approached by founders or startups or new business people that they come to me like Peter, can you get me a meeting with this brandy Nelvia?

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 37:49

Maybe, peter, can you get me a meeting with this branding human group, for example, and I'm just going like, but why would they want to work with you? And they go well, I want to sell my tech to them, I want to sell my digital tech to them or some sort of my new platform. I'm just like well, just because you have the tech doesn't mean they're going to work with you. Like, there needs to be more reasons beyond the tech itself, and I think many of the fashion tech companies that I do come across, they do forget that human element, and, especially when you are at the start of building your, your roster of clients and your portfolio, they are necessarily concerned by the tech that you presented to them, and you've obviously figured that out. By the way, you are standing with them, jonathan, so it is working for you, and I think many of us I'm, I'm tops you forget about that.

Jonthan Chippindale: 38:38

Yeah, I mean I was. I mean I mentioned I was in New York and I was at the NRS show, just walking around and I'd never done the NRS show because, yeah, as we've talked about over the last few minutes, everything that we do is completely different. I don't have a thing, a widget to sell. We have ideas and and and. But as I walked around NRS and I met, I saw vendor after vendor that were selling really important, powerful tech. I very quickly looked around and thought I don't belong here. You know, I just don't. I don't understand any of this.

Jonthan Chippindale: 39:09

I would stop at a, at a, at a, at a vendor and ask what they do. And they were. They were doing absolute. They were absolutely specializing in in, in data that comes out of customers that have gone into the basket but then fallen out. And why have they fallen out? And it's just that little, tiny little bit. And I didn't understand. I mean, I understood what they were trying to do, but but it very quickly got into a very deep tech conversation. That, by the way, critical to a brand, no, no doubt about it, I'm not denigrating it. I think it was incredible, but it's just not us. And and none of the things that I saw there were kind of us. I felt very alien there.

Jonthan Chippindale: 39:50

What I want to do is get on that sofa and have a chat to to people about insights and about things that make their hair on the back of the neck stand up, because because, wow, I, I, I, yeah, we've kind of created an emotional connection. It's that poor girl crying at the Dunnhill. You know, we asked what, what? Yeah, but actually that's what actually does right. So you know, why do we wear fashion? We do it to for a number of reasons, but to trigger a response, or to fit in, or you know, and and I mean I lost that kind of quote, I guess.

Jonthan Chippindale: 40:21

I mean I come from De Beers, right, and De Beers were very clever at creating emotions around products. And you know, I wonder. There's that great quote which is not from De Beers but but it's very, very similar that you know, like very similar plays from Charles Revlon in 1920s. Like I don't sell the cream that comes out of the tube, I sell the feeling that the woman has walking down Fifth Avenue feeling a million dollars. I think about that a lot.

Jonthan Chippindale: 40:44

And again on at De Beers, I think about a sparkly stone. Sparkle equals love. The more sparkle, the more loves. What is more important in this world of love? If you can link diamonds to love, that's incredible and and that's what I did for 20 years while I worked for De Beers, and. But it's marketing, right, it's. It's a piece of marketing strategy done with some love. But when I got married and I gave my wife an engagement ring, I knew it was a conceit and I'm quite a cynical person and I loved every minute of it, you know. So, yeah, and it's one of the most important moments of my life, and I knew that it wasn't real, that it was a marketing play, but but it was so strong, so powerful that that I was absolutely completely all over it. So, yeah, again, a lot of technology is rational.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 41:35

So not even you could get over the sparkles.

Jonthan Chippindale: 41:37

No, Jonathan, you still talking to a luxury car manufacturer at the moment and you know they're all about. They're all about, you know, speed and acceleration and performance and the quality of the stitches. You know that's the things that turn them on. And, by the way, they do very well with that kind of message. But we were having other types of conversations. You know, the car is a physical object, right, but but a car can take you to meet friends. A car, you know, I'm going to get in the car later today and take my family up to see their grandmother, you know, and we'll get out of the car and there'll be hugs and my mum will be just so happy to see the kids. And you know there's, there was a story that I'm watching. My, my, my son, when he was a teenager, was quite into kind of top gear and those car guys and and yeah, they were all kids really are they those, those guys? Except they're very, except that class and Jerry class were quite clever because he plays the buffoon. But then he was driving his Porsche and suddenly he talked about this story where, where actually he was in his twenties and he had one of those cars and he had a phone call from his mother who said his father had a stroke and wasn't projected to to live the night and he got in that car and that car was fast enough to get in so that you can actually say goodbye to his father and and I don't know.

Jonthan Chippindale: 43:01

I think there's something interesting. We were doing a work for airports at Christmas and you know we were thinking about what's. You know, airports are awful places in many ways, but come Christmas or Thanksgiving, the places where they're like gateways, where people come through emotional journeys, you know you travel home for Christmas, you travel to meet loved ones, you go through that airport to be with your family and to have that fantastic feeling of being together. And that's during the year we all spread out, but we come together, no matter where we are in the world. We come together. There's a sort of an emotional connection and a warmth and actually if we can link that, that notion of an airport, rather than just as a kind of a heart but as a gateway to warmth and love, then we can start to get into interesting places. So I guess that's just the way that we kind of think how do we get, how do we drill anything back to that notion of being human.

Jonthan Chippindale: 43:53

And again, one of the things I think it's really when you think about the really powerful technologies, like the really powerful ones, they're not visible, right. They're invisible we have they sort of fold themselves into the way that we kind of live. And you know, these mobile phones are really good case in point, right, we don't think about them and it's how we find out about the world and it's how we find out about our friends and whether they're happy or sad. And, yes, echo chambers and algorithms and all of that. But, like I didn't think about this, it's just it's it's, it's like a hand, right, it's like a part of my, my body.

Jonthan Chippindale: 44:27

And I think most tech that I see in the fashion world and the you know most of them in that work, I notice it and I think and headsets are a good example If I notice it, then it's not intuitive yet it will get there. It will get there, but right here, right now, today, actually, the more of a barrier between us separating us from brands, rather than you know something that's more seamless and kind of hides that kind of no man's land between us and the brand. We need ways of drawing us in and again, I think a lot of technology does the opposite of what it's trying to do.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 45:07

I think our listeners just by listening to you talk. Jonathan, you have a lot of stories that you could tell and I'm pretty sure that you and I could just talk all day, to be honest. But I want to finish the episode off with a quick fire round of questions. So the first question, first answer that comes to your head are you ready? Go for it. Have you read fashion tech applied yet?

Jonthan Chippindale: 45:27

Not yet. I'm looking. I'm looking forward to doing so, though, in the very near future. Your favorite client project that you've worked on. It's going to have to be one of the art projects, either the work we do with Jenny Holzer, but probably also Dream Machine, which is part of the Unboxed Festival. Look it up on our site. It was a journey into the very depths of your mind, a journey of neuroscience, and I loved it Digital or physical marketing.

Jonthan Chippindale: 45:53

Yeah, so neither we're trying to explore that space where the two merge. We don't use the word physical because it's banned from our agency. I don't like it, but each of those has got interesting opportunities and it's trying to merge those opportunities into a third way.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 46:07

I completely agree with the word physical. It's overused corporate buzzword, but that's a conversation. One digital design tool that you can't live without.

Jonthan Chippindale: 46:17

My team I know that sounds crass and trite, but I mean my team are the makers, like I say, I think I mean if I have a value to hellish, it's as a very light hand on the tiller, gently sort of keeping the nose of the boat in the right direction. But the power it all comes from the team. I couldn't do without them.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 46:38

Best piece of advice for creators wanting to join or build their own creative studio.

Jonthan Chippindale: 46:43

So a couple of things. First of all, embrace chaos, recognize that it's very difficult to plan for anything and actually life as a startup is tumbling down a hill, but you will get to the bottom, I think. Also, don't worry about decisions that you haven't made. Like if you get to a crossroads and you can go left or right, don't worry. Don't go down the right one and think I should have gone down to the left one. Once you've started on something, keep pushing, keep going and never, ever, ever, be afraid to change or pivot. Just my life since starting hellish, hellish in itself. All the variety of work that we've been talking about is as a result of pivots. Just see where the value is and go for it, and don't. The kind of tree that bends with the wind survives. Don't be afraid to check different routes, different ideas.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 47:33

I love that. On that note, everyone embrace chaos. I think that's going to be my mantra. Absolutely.

Jonthan Chippindale: 47:41

Thank you so much for your time, jonathan, A real pleasure and good luck with the book, and I will be reading it as soon as I can get a hands-on on a copy.