It’s important to be subtly rebellious because what that does is allows a foothold into the rebellion. Rather than it being here as a brick wall, and you either understand what our stance is or you don’t, and it’s binary, it’s black or white, the subtle adds a little bit of nuance or a little bit of grey to that, where it gives you a little foothold into understanding, opening your mind, and then making a decision about where you sit on on that position. With NON, as Luke mentioned, the original briefing and the process around getting to know the product, getting to know the founders and their vision of what they were seeking to do was really when the idea was in its infancy. There was a lot of product testing and the flavour profiles were really still under development. There wasn’t a name, it was a ‘project X’ type of situation. Naming can be one of those things which is inherently fraught with danger because there’s 20 million different businesses out there that have all used some kind of word to differentiate themselves. The idea of finding something that is completely unused within a sector is almost an impossible task if it’s to be not so abstract that it’s just a made up word. When we stumbled across NON, it was something that was such a perfect fit for that duality of reading. There on surface level it does what it says on the tin. It’s saying that the product is non-alcoholic, for which there’s still a huge amount of education needed. Because it’s the first in market, or one of the first in market, that is going to be credibly placed on dining tables at fine dining restaurants, at casual dining restaurants, at home environments, that is on par with an alcoholic beverage experience – not only in the complexity of the product, but also in terms of the volume and the format and the way in which it’s served. So by having NON on it, you’re almost staking a claim to that whole sector of non-alcoholic beverages, but in a subtle breakdown because it’s only three letters and there’s two repeating letters in there. The fact that it is an initialism or an acronym for ‘Notice Of Non-compliance’, then that is this peaceful protest. It’s not in your face saying, ‘Hey, fuck you’. But it’s saying, ‘We don’t subscribe to that belief’. From my perspective, it’s almost the core nugget of that embodiment of the questioning why. Of that thinking, no, we don’t just take that for granted. We think, why not?

That’s exactly right. It really comes down to the why, and it’s the thing you can pin on the wall and come back to every time we have a new idea for something you want to put out, if it’s a poster or a campaign or video, it’s got to be non-compliant in the sense of the norms of what’s traditionally done in the beverage space. It’s got to be unique to NON. It’s got to embody that spirit.

That’s a fairly common trait for designers, but within TCYK, it’s inherent in the name. You are the company you keep and we seem to attract like-minded people, which is fortunate because you get great outcomes from that. Whilst they’re not designers, they’re creatives, they’re naturally born creatives. When you get creatives in the room together, regardless of subject matter expertise, the tennis ball starts going backwards and forwards. You could see that from day one, not only just from meeting them, but from tasting the product. When people are willing to take on a fairly ingrained sector; the fact that you have alcoholic beverages with good food and they’re saying, oh, well, there’s an alternative to this. Then the product inherently, the ingredients within that, really weird combinations that are so complex, you can tell, you can read between the lines that these people are really interested in pushing boundaries, but also in creating things. When you are interested in creating things, you don’t want to be bound by a vehicle. It can be anything; it could be any kind of sensory component. That’s where it’s integral to come back to what this core ideal is, because that’s the guiding light or the guiding vision. That means, ‘This is what is on brand and what’s off-brand’. That gives you a lot of free room to then go nuts and have a play. To come back to your original question, we are fortunate to do that with a lot of our clients. I don’t know what the magic sauce is though.

A lot of our clients are disruptors within their sector. That really resonates with us and we can get behind it because we love that passion and that attitude for never settling. We say this all the time internally – we don’t really believe in reincarnation. We believe you’ve got one time in this life. You’ve got to put your energy into everything you do, and with as much passion and zest as possible and why not shake things up a bit because same same, enormous boring.

It’s a promo video for the brand that obviously doesn’t feel like a traditional promo video, as we talked about. What we looked to was directors that we really liked or films that we thought were really interesting, whether it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or it’s Under The Skin, these films that at their time really challenged the status quo themselves and had this real interest. We wanted to pay homage to that in a way by creating these different alien-like environments where you didn’t know where it was. There’s no gravity, things are floating, it’s like space. It’s just a symbol or representation of this idea of ‘Notice Of Non-compliance’; it’s not the normal promo video for a non-alcoholic beverage, let alone an alcoholic beverage, or anything, it’s different. And it’s unique. As Rhys said earlier, it’s not for unique’s sake, but it’s true to their brand experience.

To jump on the back of what Luke was saying, in the landing experience of the website, with the video that begins the experience of the product for someone coming through that digital platform, quite often, you would have what is traditionally a photo shoot. It’s caught on camera, it’s real. It’s proof that this thing exists, that it is worthy and it’s not some market store that was there one week and is gone the next week, and isn’t legitimate. But in the same way, with this brand position or this brand attitude, the first thing you see with NON is not a real life physical embodiment of the bottle, but a computer rendered version of the bottle that we worked very closely with 3D2D on. The possibility of that is that you’re questioning what is real or what isn’t real because it’s hyperreal in terms of the rendering. The quality of the rendering is so good that it’s hard to see whether it is real or not, but then the way in which it behaves is obviously beyond physics, beyond what could happen in a real world. It’s again, that embodiment of uber confidence that it is something serious and the quality of the product is there. You’re not relying on external gratification to think, okay, it has to go and follow these cultural norms and these standards. Through doing that, you’re inviting the viewer in to see that more is possible than what they expect and maybe NON is a vehicle for that.

With this client, they’re like ‘it’s not weird enough’.

But it’s also trust; we have it, we’ve had it. We’ve had a long working relationship together the last three years. It’s just been a product of trust. If we had done this straight off the bat, we probably would’ve had to have a few more conversations around why, but we trust each other and they will push us and we will push them to create something that’s authentic to NON.

On a serious note, it comes back to those really initial conversations whereby you are seeking to understand the motivation behind not only the brand, but the business. Why did they start doing this? They could have chosen to do anything. Why this? And then through this, what are they hoping to achieve in the short term, in the mid term and the long term? Really being invested in understanding the complexity of that and not just seeing your job as an intervention at one moment in time, but someone that through your subject matter expertise can help guide them to realise that vision. Again, not putting your own biases on that vision, but really being a lens in which to distill down what is important, clarify that, and through doing that process, a lot of trust is inherently built because there’s this knowing that you understand, you truly understand what there is to achieve. With that, there’s a fidelity of expression that you really can embody through whatever it happens to be in terms of a specific project, whether it is a website, the packaging, a campaign, doesn’t really matter; that fidelity allows that latitude of trust because that groundwork has been laid and it underpins all the decision making that you’re doing, because it’s there to reinforce that core mission and understands where it’s at within the journey. Are we one year in? And if we’re one year in, where are we intending to be as a brand, as a business, as a world; have we reached our objectives? When we step up and we look around one year in, are we seeing what we expected to see? Or is it a different world? And if it’s a different world, that’s all fine. Now we’ve got more information to then jump off from there on, and that’s all really started from those initial conversations.

They trust us because they know that we have their best intentions. We want success for this brand. And we’re working for success for this brand. It’s not a vanity project. This is where we see the most opportunity and the most cut-through for them so that they can really succeed as a business.