David Carrewyn: Simplicity Works

Last year, we hosted an All Day Communion with lots of wonderful guest speakers. We had some of these talks transcribed and published in our first ever newspaper, which celebrated one whole year of Communion. 100% of the proceeds from the paper go to Papyrus UK, a charity that works hard to prevent young suicide in the UK. You can buy the paper here, and listen to all of our previous guest talks here.

We know that watching videos and buying publications isn’t always accessible to everyone, so we thought we’d put the transcribed talks up on the blog too. We hope you enjoy them.

David is extraordinary. Tell us your story, David. 

I'm from Belgium and I moved around as a kid quite a bit, which was great. I picked up a bunch of languages, but due to that I struggle to have a sense of home. Every three to four years we got hauled up and moved somewhere else, which I think is the reason why I fell in love with skateboarding. Skateboarding is a community. In addition to a thing that you do, it's also a group that you become a part of. My appreciation for having a network and a community I think was really enhanced through skateboarding. 

I went back to Belgium when I was 18 and went to art school there, studying industrial design. 10 years later I went to the US, back in the early 2000s, I worked for Levi’s. San Francisco in the early 2000’s was a magical, magical place in time. When I started working at Levi’s, they just laid off basically the entire art department after some tough results, and they hired me and my job was to develop graphics for T-shirts. I had no team, so I had to outsource it - I started looking at the back pages of magazines and cold calling people. I became friends with people like Frank Kozik and Dave Choe. I became friends with Shepard Fairey. It was a really extremely special part of my career and my life journey.

I always sort of take issue when people define themselves through the brand that they work for or their jobs, but these are important to me because they're stepping stones. Each one is a reaction to the last one. When I started, I was doing graphics at Levi's and then I sort of got bored with that, so I went to Abercrombie and Fitch and I became the head of marketing. Marketing at Abercrombie is basically photography and store design, I really couldn't care less for the brand - I'm going to put that out there right now - but the job was the most amazing experience and challenge. Once I became comfortable with the craft of being a creative director, I went to Converse. Converse is a brand that I cared deeply about for reasons of; culture, passion, punk rock, skateboarding, self expression, all those things. I stayed there for eight years and that's kinda an abnormally long period of time for a creative director to be at the same brand. We all know you run out of tricks at some point, how many photos of shoes can you take before you want to shoot yourself? So from there, I started getting into a place of cynicism and I realised, what is this all about? So then I did some work for Surfrider Foundation, which is Pro Bono if you guys are familiar with them, they basically protected coastlines and were a massive non profit organisation. I did a full rebrand exercise for them, which was really good for the soul, especially coming from eight years at the same brand. I then worked for North Face, where sort of everything clicked and it was really an amazing experience. Coca Cola came knocking on my door, and as someone who obsesses over brands and brand building and consumer journeys and things of that nature, there is no greater challenge or honour to be given the keys to that castle.

I believe in standards. In order to be super creative, you have to have really strong foundations. So I spend a lot of time developing brand standards. When I worked with North Face we realised there was a huge problem with the general lack of role models within the space of exploration. When you Google female explorer you find one result - Dora the Explorer. If that's not crushing, I don't know what is. So we decided to do something about it. We did a couple of seasons focusing solely on all the female athletes within North Face. It was amazing and it led to a really nice campaign called She Moves Mountains. We were sort of trying to reset the idea that exploration is not about mountains and beards, but it's actually a mindset. 

I was also involved in the launch of the Chuck II with Converse. That was a really good example of doing a campaign across all the touchpoints, it was one of the greatest honours of my career - to celebrate the most iconic shoe ever made. The shoe that gets drawn in children's books - you want to draw a sneaker, you're probably going to draw a little circle on the ankle. The idea was to acknowledge the fact that its iconic status was given to it by the consumers; by what people did with it, by the creativity that happened with it. It's not anything that any executive can take credit for. So the idea was to take people like Patti Smith or just amazing creators and create their portrait through their shoes. There's a tremendous amount of poetry behind the idea. When I see it, it still does something to me even now.

I want to talk real fast about why I’m at Coke. Coke is in 205 countries out of 207, and if you want to affect change, you need scale. I feel like there's a massive opportunity to do good here, and I'm very, very excited at the challenge to take the world's most recognised brand and turn it into a force. That's my challenge, that’s my mission. That's what I'm here to do. 

David, not only was that beautiful, but it was purposeful. There's something here about politics and brand and bravery. These things really matter. How can you unite politics and change in Coca Cola?

With working for a big business, people have very strong opinions about it. But I think there's a bigger question around the notion of standing for something, and I don't want to talk about the latest corporate trend of having a brand purpose or hiring a consulting firm to come and write it. I'm talking about understanding the difference between an idea and just noise and stuff, just activity. It's something that drives me nuts. Just a cacophony of Instagram posts - if each post was a piece of paper, imagine the landfill, imagine the size of the mountain. The standards have gone down and now it’s just about content feeding, feeding the beast and all of that is hiding the concept of an idea. The message that I have for my team and my teams in all the other brands is; a mediocre design of a great idea is really great but a great design of a mediocre idea is always going to be shit. So the exponential and powerful momentum behind having a real idea is going to carry the whole thing. There is a team here right, Reasons to be Cheerful? The reason that I think that we can all be cheerful is because there's outrage again, and the outrage is leading to stronger thinking and a stronger point of view and people are sharing actual ideas. The brands just bombarding you with consumerism, it seems like that’s taking a step back. Now people have started to realise that it matters what you say. It's not just about the noise, it really matters. That's an interesting pivot for all these brands, and it certainly is for Coca Cola too.

What brand now, David? What brand are you inspired to join? If you were to roll on 10 years and you've done an amazing job at Coke, where would you want to go in 10 years time?

I wanna doodle. I wanna doodle with Philip. No, but I think that the corporate thing is an interesting thing, because I feel like I can help and it's an amazing intellectual challenge. That's why I've made sure that each brand I worked with was very different to the previous one. But to be honest with you, this is not my life calling. This is not the thing that I want to continue to do. I feel like there's an amazing challenge on the table at Coca Cola and I'm going to sink my teeth into it, but when that's over I'm going to be completely, maybe doing something else, not just going for the next bigger brand.

It's not about size, it's about which brand you want to help grow the most, I guess. It's probably unfair to put you on the spot like that.. Ok someone asked, what piece of work by somebody else do you wish you’d done?

I've always admired what Patagonia does. The way Patagonia have approached their creative eye. I like the purity of what they stand for; anything that's in the non profits based charity water, I like all those things.

What's the best piece of advice you would give to someone who was starting and building their own brand?

I would say be authentic. The weird metaphor that I've always found from my job is that I'm a landscaper, and my job is to sort of cut things back. Things have a tendency to overgrow, to become too dense and then we have to do too much too quickly. There's something about being restrained and having something to say and saying it eloquently. Repetition works. Simplicity works. I definitely have noticed it in my work and my tendency towards more minimalism and simple design. I think it's important to be quiet and to understand to reserve the megaphone for when you actually have something really good to say, because if you always have your megaphone on then you’re always shouting.