This is one of the many boards we put together to demonstrate the look we would be creating for OWLSA. The approach was to merchandise and design into the look in order to give a sense of how we would be approaching it.

The intention was to create a brand that delivered men’s wear for the first year, extending to women’s wear the following year. We would be doing 5 collections per year and shipping monthly to all of our retail partners. Our product plan and approach was aggressive, as we already had all of the retail contacts. As we imagined the brand, we did all of the first stage work to develop the product styling we would approach for the first year.

This quad is the method and framework of CO:COLLECTIVE, who I was fortunate to get to work with and learn from on this project.  Shortly after I started building the business case I ran into a close friend, Ty Montague, at wedding in Tuscany. Ty was the head of creative at JWT in NYC. He had recently published a book titled True Story and formed Co:Collective, a new kind of creative agency focused on “story-doing” instead of storytelling.  Ty gave me the book and I carried it with me the rest of the vacation, reading it cover-to-cover before I made it home. I firmly believe in this type of authentic “story-doing” brand architecture, and in empowering brands to create authentic actions which come from the center of their brand to make a positive impact on the world. This image is my first attempt at pulling all of the brand architecture into one image. I will likely iterate on this and transform it into a video.

This was the heart of soul of what we aimed to create in the OWSLA brand.

This is an abbreviation of everything we collected in this area. We spent a lot of time evaluating what the industry was doing from a business perspective, and which brands were emerging to serve this audience. We identified a clear opportunity to create a brand that fully established the lifestyle OWSLA was already doing. However, we saw a deeper opportunity, we could use the transformative energy of the audience and the music to do good for the entire community.

The more time we spent researching, the more we saw a clear opportunity for OWSLA to lead as the culture creator. It was also clear that no one had a greater ambition than making money, and almost no one was trying to do good for the world in what they were giving back to the community. It was merely a commodification that was taking place.

Participants are who we aimed to champion, the fans. We did an exhaustive amount of research across not just OWSLA artists, but all artists in the industry from a quantitative as well as qualitative perspective. As we looked we knew we were breathing the right approach for the design choices we would make in the strategy and product.

The first phase outlined the strategy we created for the brand and the products we planned to create. It outlined the full market positioning and what we defined as the opportunity of the brand to really own the space as a leader. We felt it appropriate to paint some of the history as well of how Jay-z had done this in hip hop in a meaningful way previously.

The Second Phase was a walk through on some initial sketches we created as potential quests OWSLA could do. In each sketch we planned to partner with local Los Angeles non-profit involved in actions in line with the OWSLA ethos, improving lives for the people of Los Angeles. Our strategy was to place pop up stores, and the profits from those stores would go to supporting that cause.