Michael Campion: What role does place play in building a brand's personality?

Bob Sheard: I think it's one of the most important ones. It creates the place that you're from, helps define your character, helps define your trajectory. It's sometimes immutable in terms of the contribution it makes to identity.

When we design the branding for Waterloo London, the fact was Waterloo will not move geographically. It will always be across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament and from Whitehall. It will always be outside the establishment. The fact that the passengers who come to and from Waterloo every day come to and from Waterloo every day because they don't live in London, because they live outside of London. It's a place outside the establishment for people that are outside London. It's a challenger, it's a rebel. It's a very wonderful place. It's a place that doesn't have codes of distinction, like the establishment, that have codes of appearance. It's a place of communites rather than greed. It's a place of chaotic creativity as opposed to order. So it's a really playful place to be. So just the physical, geographic space of Waterloo, the South Bank, created an amazing distinction within the brand of London.

When we did Arc'teryx we had to create distinction between and its nearest competitor, which was the North Face. So we said that "where's the North Face from?". It's from America, which is totemic of Western civilization. Western civilization has been at war, if you include Europe within Western civilization, for about 5,000 years, with the odd outbreak of peace. But it's been 5,000 year chronology of races colliding with the races, civilizations with civilizations and religions with religions and, more recently, nations with nations. What that has created is a very competitive psychosis within our culture and within our relationship with both sport and the outdoors, so that even permeates our religion.

In the sort of opening of Genesis, it talks about man's dominion over nature, our control and ownership over nature. In our relationship with sport, if you look at global sports channels, there's always a definitive loser. So we have this very competitive, conquering relationship. Arc'teryx isn't from there. is from Canada. Canada touches the Arctic Circle. It shares that with the Urals. It shares it with Scandinavia. It's Northern civilization. It's a civilization that's shamanic and nomadic. It's shamanic in that it lives in balance with nature, it doesn't own nature, and it's nomadic in that it leaves no trace. So the place that is from means that we can create a brand that isn't of ego and it's a brand that lives in balance with nature versus one that conquers nature.

So very clearly you can see if you build that meaning system around that brand, it creates difference versus the competition and it has done, its worked. It's meant, Arc'teryx has become a globally iconic player.

Michael Campion: It expresses itself, doesn't it, in just the subtlety of its logo, and it's often very, very small, almost indistinguishable on the fabric.

Bob Sheard: Yeah, and it's the same with other areas of the the world, Leica pivots off german engineering, or Omega pivots off Swiss mastery of precision. It's kind of, place defines many of the brands that we love.