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True Serendipity.
Many years ago, in a student-led sustainable apparel project with an Arts and Design school, the brand TRU2U was born.
It was a simple idea - that any company that was manufacturing stuff, should be transparent, or ‘TRU’, about materials, working conditions, and every aspect of a supply chain, from making to selling.
To the students enmeshed in the project, it seemed obvious. If we make the most basic of things – underwear, for example, we can tell the story to all sides - consumers, makers and retailers - about how apparel is made in the global economy. All sides would come to better understand how things are made, the students argued, and when things are made with better materials, working conditions and the stories behind them, you feel good about buying and wearing it. We’ll call it TRU2U.
Years later, when TRU2U, the underwear concept, didn’t make it through our second round of funding, we resurrected the branding process that we created to design, develop and map the brand’s path forward, and tried it on other organizations that were looking for a discovery, research and social impact/sustainability plan. When we applied it to others, it made a world of difference, not just for branding but also for their business strategy, their development goals, their impact and their communications.
Because it worked so well and gave our clients clearer insight into their core businesses and a path forward, we didn’t feel so bad about the underwear startup that didn’t quite get off the ground.
You could say, we lost our underwear, but found a new footing.
To this day, TRUbranding and this process of designing and igniting a brand for social change, is the core of what we offer.
When someone asks me what I do, I often say that I am in the business of helping change-makers - social entrepreneurs, brands, NGOs, non-profits, to discover what they do and where they are going. I do it with the power of communications - helping brands to effectively communicate a compelling and consistent message across everything they do.
You might ask, why wouldn’t an organization know why they do what they do, know what key business they are in, or how they can actually contribute to making the world a better place?
The truth is, we might start out with a clear sense of who we are and what our purpose is, but pretty soon, the challenges of running a purpose-driven business or nonprofit gets consumed by making the trains run on time, finding enough money to run them, and making sure we are delivering to our key stakeholders. Whether or not we are actually having an impact on what we set out to do, is a whole other question.
We don’t often have the luxury of pausing to question: why did we originally get started?; where did we come from?; what do we want to risk to get there?; and other essential questions that will help us to build a ‘better’, more impactful, resonant and memorable brand.
When you have a process that takes you back to the beginning and starts with revealing ‘who, why, what,’ (and some other key questions), true insights are born. Add the best of your team’s creative talent and some of your key stakeholders, and it becomes a time machine of AHA moments.
The process itself, of creatively diving in, exploring, brainstorming, imagining the future and mapping it together becomes a roadmap for the organization’s next steps. It gives you another attempt and possible strategy for helping you to achieve what you originally set out to do.
One way to think of this process is to remember that scene in the Wizard of OZ at the end of the movie when Dorothy is distraught that she will never get her one wish – to get back to Kansas, until Galinda, the good witch, tells her she has always had the power all along. (but she had to learn it on her journey).
Once she names what’s most important, closes her eyes, and trusts, she finds herself where she wanted to be all along.
So if you feel you might have failed once upon a time (twice or more), take time to reflect on what you might have learned in that failure, lessons you might have gleaned, and nuggets you can honestly attribute to having learned from that hardship. That’s a win, no matter what others might think.
It is in mining these hard won truths - all of them, good and bad, that will help you to reframe losses into wins, and integrate those truths into lessons for innovation and impact.