Job’s Not Done: with Arthur Foliard

25:52Arthur Foliard:I mean, there are others, but I find it harder and harder to find examples of great products that have terrible brands or brands that we actively dislike. Okay. Maybe you have some. But I'm saying, but the product is so great that we are like, and so helpful and so useful and so well integrated. You can't live with it. It doesn't matter. Yeah. I think Uber is my best example. Yeah, that's good. I'm looking for others. No, that's perfect. Lyft, I think, is a better brand. And so what was the sort of impetus in that sort of project? How did they come to you guys? What were they looking for? Sort of what was the brief?

26:36That they always felt like the funny little cousin, you know, that was kind of edgy for the right reason. And I think they're still going to do a lot of things, you know, helping people go vote or when there's a earthquake, you know, somewhere else, they're helping people just move around. but realized that they could actually just get a little bit more people and look more sophisticated, more mature. Because they're massive, as you know. Yeah. And they're absolutely incredible. And so why would you pick Uber versus Lyft to go to the airport? When actually sometimes it's the same drivers. The product is equally incredible.

27:08I think there's a lot more that they're doing for the community. And it's interesting because the first time we talked to Lyft, we were like, we're going to make you mental, right? We're going to make you pink. Pink is your color. Of course. We're going to go big. we're going to go bold and it was maybe an assumption on our hand just to make lift look a little bit more like lifts of today but actually don't understand that the business can actually grow really well and it can be a real competitor there's another choice yeah that's what the ceo was saying david he was like there's another choice when you get your phone you don't have to go to uber you can get lyft and lyft has an incredible range obviously of uh drivers and cars you can get your normal lifts you know in pink to uh live black as well like uber and so a lot of the work was how do we make sure that we protect the legacy of the brand which was evolving the logo the color how do we use pink in a slightly more purposeful way um while also just yeah looking a little bit more serious and a little bit more mature because you probably

28:07Arthur Foliard:remember lift with the pink mustaches as much as i like it and i think internally everyone loved it and understood why they did that in the first place. It feels like a better time to do something different now. Yeah, I feel like those mustaches were so weird that they could never lose the stigma of being like... You can't have the mustache and have a leaf black and have the big SUV. As much as it's not present all the time, as much as we'd love it. Do they not do the mustaches anymore? They don't do it. Is the mustache gone? Yeah, it's still gone. Kevin, where do you stand on the mustaches? Did you guys kill it?

28:37Yeah, we didn't kill it. They actually killed it before. I absolutely love the mustache. I would wear the mustache every day. They killed it before. They just realized that. In some ways, Airbnb is very different, but Airbnb had the same thing, which is they were loved by people that wanted a hair mattress on the floor

28:58Arthur Foliard:and a private room. And they realized, yeah, we can still be a successful business doing this when someone goes to a festival or a config or something like that. But if we want to get bigger and if we want to talk to everyone, we're going to have to give more options and you can't look as silly or as friendly as they were before. Did you guys even try to bring the mustache back? No. Well, maybe. No, I don't think it did. We tried to really push. Kevin's mad. To be honest, he's got a good grip. I'm looking at pictures of cars with mustaches on them right now and they look amazing. On a personal level, there's a lot of things I like about a mustache.

29:36From a business point of view, I totally understood the push with the new strategy, obviously. But what we really tried to do, there you go. I mean, it looks pretty cool.

29:45Arthur Foliard:If you tell me this can't get you to the airport on time, I won't believe you. But yeah, like I said, we try to make it a little bit, we talk about not taking yourself seriously. We're thinking, well, maybe Lyft just needs to still feel quite edgy and wacky and fun. But realize, you know, with a client that it's not, what the business needs. And so we pushed the maturity, elevation, et cetera, just to make it feel a little bit more sophisticated. I still think that Leif will always feel a little bit different than Uber and not as serious. And I think a lot of people love the brand. But yeah, this is where we got to.

30:24Next time we talk to Leif, they'll mention the mustache.

30:26Arthur Foliard:Yeah, I mean, listen, when you're looking for your car and it's dark and you're like, which one's my car? And you're like, oh yeah, that's the one that has the giant mustache on the front. I mean I did like Distinctive I did like the the pink neon Yeah they kind of that was like the the subtle like evolution it's like not an actual furry mustache on the front of a car Yeah We'll just do like a light up mustache on the inside of a car Exactly That feels a little bit more tasteful But I think yeah the question is if you're CEO of a healthcare brand you know would you go to the pink mustache and I know this is not just the audience but I think they're trying to talk to everyone You're never going to convince Kevin that a pink mustache shouldn't be on a car I feel like Kevin I've lost Kevin yeah listen i get it um you know it's it's it's it's a great mustache and also just generally cars need more uh accessories you know that i think that is the main takeaway it's not just about mustache but why don't why don't cars have fedoras or sort of earrings of some sort right you know it's opportunities yeah big opportunities here there you go but no opportunities it's a it's a beautiful rebrand and like i said making lift more like lift and i think yeah there's something that is a bit more playful a little bit more fun in the logo in the typeface typeface Which is quite unexpected for tech giants, you know, to have something that has a bit more of this serif kind of nature to it.

31:42It feels a little bit more wacky, a bit more expressive. So, yeah, we were really pleased with it. It is a shame, though, that like more brands should be more like weird and funny.

31:52Arthur Foliard:Yeah. Like this different. And, you know, we've seen some brands trying to do this successfully until they got acquired by Intuit by the MailChimp. Yeah. It was absolutely incredible. and it went super yellow with the illustration, the logo, etc. That was absolutely incredible, I thought. Yeah. Unfortunately. They had a good run. Yeah, they had a good run, yeah. I always loved MailChimp's ads. I always thought they did a good job of explaining what they do, but in a weird awful way. And we met a few people from the internal MailChimp team, and you could see that they really wanted to embrace the weirdness, the distinctiveness of this, and I think it's a great example of how you can be distinctive but also speak to, you know, enterprise, you know, people and you, you know, you're really pushed to B2B aspect of things.

32:36So, uh, it's a shame now it's been a bit canned.

32:39Arthur Foliard:Yeah. It's funny. Like, uh, now I'm thinking about your work. It's like, you do have a sort of knack for working with these brands that are sort of like solid products, like that people really use like TripAdvisor is another one, right? Like TripAdvisor is like one of the most used websites. It's like a very useful thing for people. Billions of reviews. Yeah. Yeah. And it always blows my mind. Like people really use TripAdvisor. Yeah. More and more. Yeah. And a lot of families that like base their trips on, oh, I found this. It was number one ranked on TripAdvisor. Yeah. Somebody's got to advise them.

33:10Arthur Foliard:That's a great product. Yeah. And I would say a truly bad brand experience. Yeah. What, five years ago or for as long as they've been around, which I feel like is wild. But it's interesting. You took to TripAdvisor and the whole thing is about travelers and reviews and get something really real. And you look at the product before we worked with them and it's bland, it's boring, there's nothing to it. And we went to them very simply saying, your whole strategy needs to be about travelers and bringing the travelers back in the middle of your brand. So that's the reason without going too deep into it.

33:43But every single photo you see on the website now is UGC. We found thousands and thousands of incredible photos. And we just ran a little filter, even before AI, a little filter that brings everything together. we use real reviews you want to be trusted as a brand you can't fake it and sometimes you're gonna have three out of five or four out of five ratings and that's fine you need to tell why and so i think something a brand has something very special at the core that kind of lost its way along the way along the way that we just brought back to life in some ways that's what happened with lyft as well so i'm not trying just to make it big or wacky or colorful for the sake of it We're just trying to find what's right for them.

34:23And that's why I think it's been also quite successful. Yeah, it's a really great.

34:27Arthur Foliard:I mean, when it comes to travel, I think we worked with the Infatuation, which is my favorite website on earth. Yeah, it's great. I use it all the time. And it's just like they've never steered me wrong. And it's very useful. And their branding and their design has always been not as great as I think what their service and their product and the platform. And so that was a big part of our work was like elevating it and sort of giving them some type A's and colors and, and expansion when it comes to restaurants. And I think TripAdvisor sort of has that, you know, sort of similar thing where it's like, you do actually, you know, it's UGC and it's trusted.

34:59Arthur Foliard:So you're like, I, I do go to this website, but then just the brand experience of it all was just so bad. Using this logic, I feel like you should do Yelp next. Yeah. That's like, oh, it'll be the next one in your sort of like. Oh, Yelp will be so good. every time I book a restaurant on Yelp I know it's going to be a great experience but people use Yelp like crazy yeah all the time it's such a popular website and I do find myself using it more and more Kevin you use Yelp? not really really? no oh come on Kevin you gotta use just Google reviews use Google no I mean Yelp is where the people are I think that's the thing it's like TripAdvisor thing it's like people are people are going to give their real experience yeah The great thing about TripAdvisor is you can literally just book everything.

35:46Understand, I want to go to Roma for five days. And you got everything from restaurant activities, a bit of what Airbnb is also trained to do. It's incredible. Yeah, you have a lot of assumption around TripAdvisor until you actually use it. And what we did during our immersion phase is actually use it. So we went around New York. Took some trips. Yeah, well, actually just around New York, but we did some trips around the Statue of Liberty and we went to FIDA, you know. but it was really interesting to see that it's actually a really great product and the truth was if i see someone real real reviews real photos has done it and said yeah you know this thing was really good food was okay etc you're going to be more likely to actually just book it because you feel this is a real thing and not a box you know so nothing's good where does the owl come from what's the story there um there was originally the or the owl that they had so when they started Do you remember the old owl with the type old TripAdvisor symbol?

36:41It's absolutely incredible. Call Ollie, by the way. I love that. But why an owl? Day and night. Help you. Just the 360 view. Help you also guide. They're wise. Yeah, wise and everything.

36:55Arthur Foliard:So it used to have one red eye and one green eye? To be politically fair, yeah, crazy do's aware is this owl, the new owl was done by Mother. Because Mother did a brand refresh before we worked on the most recent rebrand. So that was about four years ago. And I think they actually did really good. The new one is a lot better. Yeah, no, it feels like a mark. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I see the old owl in the most random places. I was back in Paris to see my family and this random Italian place has the old owl. And look, I think sometimes it's good to be like we said, distinctive and different. I was like, this is good.

37:36They moved away from that. That looks insane. It looks like it's on some sort of LSD trip or something. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like it's like had a real long night. Yeah. A bunch of drugs.

37:45Arthur Foliard:Exactly. Which, I mean, listen, I guess that is kind of the people go spend long nights on trips, you know. Yeah. They have fun. But no, the new one looks a lot better. But yeah, I've seen the old one, but it's one of those brands, again, like you see it out there. It's in the world that you don't like. As long as you see it's in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the US. think about it but then like i imagine you work on a project like that and you just like it's everywhere it's on all the doors yeah it's like it's a it's it's it's a brand that like is very useful and very a part of culture yeah if you actually look into it it's actually a great brand a great product yeah and i think a lot of times like yeah you don't have to have the world's greatest brand to be a part of culture sometimes like you're just useful for people yeah and i think especially in this like new world of like you know sort of the internet and we're it's crazy that like we're still in seemingly like early stages of it but it's like connection of like people want to find the best restaurants, so they want to know exactly the best hotels.

38:37Arthur Foliard:And these were some of the first websites that helped us do those things, which brings us to Amazon, the first website to sell us things on the internet. Arthur, you're impressed. That's called professional podcasting. Yes. Let's talk about Amazon. Let's do it. Another really good product that has not spent a ton of time on brand, and famously so. And so that's got to be bucket list project for most designers, I think, in terms of an opportunity. Like I said before, there's not that many great products that are part of life and part of culture and part of society that just like haven't been modernized, haven't been given good design, haven't been rebranded.

39:25Arthur Foliard:And Amazon is like probably the post-shop of that. Yeah. Probably the biggest brand in the world. Of course. Yeah. So used by 2 billion people every day. That's insane. Isn't it mad? That's fucking insane. A million. That's all the people. A thousand is a lot. So talk to us about like that project. Does that wind up in your inbox? Like how does like, does that come to Kodo New York? Like was there a fight between the Kodos to do this? No, we went straight to Kodo New York in our inbox. Jeff directly? No, no, Jeff. I imagine. Hey, what's up? It's me, Jeff. Arthur, how are you? There's a before-after in our growth at Kodo when you work on a really good project.

40:11We talked about this, the bolt of this world. And all of a sudden, you've got Amazon. And this is a life-changing, career-changing kind of project. So you put everything into it. And I remember when we actually won, we heard that we won the project. We were on the way back from a meeting that we had. and we tried to hug each other with the strategies that we were working on. But then we headbutted each other. Oh my God. But literally like in this, you know, stupid movie. Yeah. And then it was like, oh my God, this is the best, holding our head. And they had this really amazing feeling that, yes, you know, let's go.

40:47Yeah. We've been pushing and we know we trusted the process and we keep pushing. We always give it more than anyone else. So it was going the extra mile on it, like new business and people and trusting. yeah the process like i said that is going to work out and somehow it feels like the best rebrand ever you know and it was absolutely quite obviously we all use amazon and the team was incredible we met very senior people right away their cco and there was a lot of ambition to it they wanted to change things and it's hard to change amazon right there are more than two million people working at amazon and there's so many different teams hundreds of sub brands as well And just to have this alignment from senior leadership, and we're talking about CEO, you know, Andy, Jesse, and Joe, everyone from the C-suite is absolutely incredible.

41:35So, yeah, it was mind-blowing.

41:37Arthur Foliard:And it's true that sometimes I was just, you know, looking back being like, wow, we are rebranding Amazon. This is absolutely incredible. So, yeah, life-changing. Pressure? Did you feel pressure to get it right? And I imagine, you know, like you said, like this is, you know, a dream brief, a dream opportunity. It won't come back. So, yeah. And so I'm good with pressure, which is it's funny because I say I'm good with pressure. And then you get a massage and you're like, you're really tight. But I don't feel I don't feel it. So like, yeah, maybe I feel the pressure. But I do remember I told the story quite a few times.

42:14So we fly to Seattle to present the first round of creative. And I remember just waking up, just getting ready. It was really early, probably 8 a.m. in the hotel room. And generally, almost talking to myself, being like, this is a defining moment of your career. Like, this is, you can't fuck that up. Like, this is, if you fuck that up, this is going to be bad. Because if you lose the trust from Amazon, it's going to be obviously a problem for me, for the team and globally, Koro. And even for them, we talk about trust. A small startup that trusts you with, you know, a few hundred K is absolutely important.

42:46But Amazon doing the same is equally important. so it's literally the biggest thing that they had done for the past 20 years so like let's go I mean there was nothing else I could do the presentation was done and we were really really well with the clients yeah they knew what we were going to present to Joe the CCO but I had this moment where I'm like oh my god and it never happened in my life and when we presented and it went really really well um and she picked the roots it just is you know you almost feel like you could cry because it was just so relieved from the you know the pressure but i did the same thing that i do all the time i was really excited and went back to new york and like this is not done the second job's not done job not done with the jersey on yeah yeah kobe face just why aren't you smiling um but generally saying yeah they loved it but they have a lot of questions and now and the big thing is going to the other team that amazon you know presenting this big rebrand saying to amazon music prime video amazon fresh that they're gonna have to change it and you know selling it and explaining why it's good so there's been a lot of uh we were on the road quite a bit yeah presenting this but yeah i have some questions i want to please let's go yeah just curious like was there

44:00Arthur Foliard:a pitching process like how and if so how long was that like no pitching no okay creds okay great we came up with um provocation strategic provocation from the brief saying that we think you're gonna I need to do this and this and that. We go, so we see our strategy team involved, myself, Alex, our C-suite on Kodo side. But no work before the work. No, they were, which is amazing. Really respectful of that. They understood the process. Provocations, like what if kind of thing. Yeah, what if. You said that there's issue with the architecture of sub-brands versus house-brands. I'm going really big, but how do we do this?

44:36Okay, so yeah, well, we think that you could do this and sometimes what we tend to do is use also some, other projects that we did. Sure. We had Uber Eats, Netflix, Airbnb, et cetera. So that also helps just to say that we can do something like that. But yeah, similar projects that answer similar issues in the brief. Exactly.

44:55Arthur Foliard:Cool. Yeah, I think this is good. I mean, designers listen to our show. Sometimes I forget that they listen and they learn things. But yeah, no, I think that is the right approach. When sometimes there's a brief that comes through and it's like there's pitch work, they want to see work. But if not, then it's like, okay, how do we show that we understand the brief and we can do it and have done it before. And obviously it's, it's obviously very strategic and not like just slapped together last minute. This is not, you know, it's, it's doing the work or showing what the work will be or leading to without doing it so they can imagine it.

45:32And also say you're going to be great partners and explain how you work and thinking already about when do we go to Seattle? When do you come to see us? How are we going to run the Figma? And you don't need to go through every single day by just showing them. Because at the end of the day, if you want to go for Kodo, Collins, Wolf Ollins, JKR, Center, we'll all do good work. I'd say our case studies are really great. We have really good...

45:57Arthur Foliard:We do the best, but just... Coca-Cola. We have all of this. So I think sometimes what makes the difference is how you feel in a room. people and so I think we put a lot of emphasis on this and we try to in some ways be very professional and serious for sure but also show that we're normal people and we're going to work on this together and I think that's what made the difference also on top of you said they're in the Figma Jeff in the Figma not Jeff yeah we built a whole thing with them in the Figma yeah which has been really really good you would probably assume and expect this to be quite limiting my a unique space to explore and so on.

46:37But actually, the more we give them access to the way that we work, the more trusted they became because they could see how much thought went into the work. They could see how much we were working, how much work we were creating every day. And in some ways, the more they worked with us on it, the more they were like, you do this, don't worry. Okay, all good. When it was time to create a presentation for Andy Jassy in the C-suite and we did it together, you would just assume that they would just take it in-house. and do their little thing and you never hear about it again. And we were just working on it all day, all night.

47:10Arthur Foliard:18 months. That's what the case study says. Yeah. 50 sub-brands. Yeah, probably even more now. Sheesh. What a giant undertaking. Yes. Question about like round one. Yeah. Was, you know, obviously the original work was done by Turner Duckworth probably what, 20 years ago? 25 or 20? Yeah. And again, very, very simple mark, A to Z. iconic yeah smile yeah was there any opportunity for change at all did you guys pitch anything that felt like it was moving them away or was that sort of pretty clearly not what they wanted um just start with i would say the logo and typeface were of the table okay um because for obvious reasons yes um but again i think a good thing that we do at kodo is just come to the conversation with a strategic and business point of view and just saying we don't want to change the logo for the sake of it you know there's a lot of values in this you have so much equity but we need to evolve it because first of all you have an arrow and arrow means a to z this is not a full representation of what your business is about anymore it's not just about delivery it's about obviously access access to your favorite show favorite music it's not just necessarily this functional A to Z.

48:25And also it was done 25 years ago when Amazon was just Amazon. And so now they have so many sub-brands that you actually need to think about scalability and new brands that they're going to create. So you can't just have this logo, for example, that was just done bespoke. You need to think about it as a tap face where you're going to be able to create more and more brands every other day. And similarly to the type, it was a tap face that was created for Kindle in the first place. Wow. Yeah, the old Ember. So really good for legibility. I don't know if you have a Kindle, but it's really legible.

48:58But when you think about scalability as well, when you think about Amazon Pharmacy or Prime Video, you need a type that has enough flexibility that can be bold and exciting and also very serious at times when you speak about people being ill or needed to be treated. So we approach all of these challenges that we felt. For example, the tap face, there were 50 different tap faces. because people didn't like that tap face they felt that it was too limiting so we said there's a way to fix it by creating this new global tap face in 360 different languages which they didn't have before that's going to do fix xyz from your brief the logo is the same you need to move away from this because of that so that really helps just introduce new elements and and make the right

49:44Arthur Foliard:decisions for for the brands really it's amazing when you look at the before on your website and you look at just like how many sub brands they had and also like some of the colors too even the orange was like really kind of 20 oranges dull though and like there was definitely like a sadness and i what i like about the new amazon that you guys did it's just like it's it's got a playfulness and it's got a fun to it that i think and humanity that i think has always been a part of that brand yeah that you talk about charm and disarm quite a bit you know it feels very rightful for them yeah and it feels like it just works across all these new uh sort of sub brands and it just yeah it's just very clean and it works well but yeah it the best work sometimes especially when it comes to rebrands like makes the old work or the old brand feels so dated and terrible and like and then you're like oh that's what it should have always been and we always say about amazon is a brand transformation or a global brand refresh versus a rebrand because they didn't need a rebrand they just needed the same but better for the the story and color is really interesting we were talking about prime quite a bit which is arguably the yeah the best of the best of Amazon and you look at how they were using the colors and everything, it felt very blunt.

50:52Arthur Foliard:Sure. So we said, actually, there's probably a better blue out there that feels a bit more saturated, a little bit more digital. That also passed accessibility. But then now, you can't just look at the blue by itself. There was a whole challenge with this brand. It's not just about picking an orange color or a blue color and being like, I'm done with this. It's understanding the impact it's going to have on the whole cohort. So look at the blue, but now you need to look at the orange. And it had 20 different shades of orange. So now we need the orange to match what's going on with blue. But then if you're on the website and you're in the retail section, the prime section, and you go to the fresh section, if the colors are completely wrong or not aligned, then it's going to feel quite disjointed.

51:30So then you start to create a palette that can work for music, for prime video, for fresh, for pharmacy. And so again, it comes from a challenge that they were facing versus us just saying, let's just change the orange. And that actually taught me and the team quite a lot around what needs to change and what doesn't need to change because I know as designers sometimes we're like I want to I want to change this like I would be so good if we change it but why are you doing it in the first place is actually the best way to get them to replace it and if Amazon is replacing all their logo on vans and boxes and everywhere in the world it's for the good reason

52:04Arthur Foliard:yeah I mean it's a beautiful project the case study I can't even imagine how long this took I feel like it has its own project. Don't even stop here. Case studies are sometimes as hard as the actual project. Is that when the job's done? When the case studies are done? You wish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That must have been its own thing. I do have a bone stick with you. Sometimes when I'm at home and I'm not paying attention, my Prime button and my Alexa button on my phone, sometimes I don't know which one's which. The blues are a little similar. So we actually changed the Prime Blue to be a little bit bluer because Alexa was not a problem.

52:45Alexa was so big and something that was not planned at the beginning when Alexa became a thing and it was Prime. So we didn't want to remove the blue from Alexa because it's so big and it's used. And Prime obviously has to be blue. So there was no other way than just making them a little bit different. So we kept Alexa as is, made it a little bit more vibrant, and then we turned Prime into a slightly bluer value. But yeah, there's a million challenges.

53:09Arthur Foliard:I was going to say, I probably got a lot of feedback on this project. A lot of feedback in the interview as well. Yeah, and probably, like I said, I think positivity, positive from the internet, I think mostly on a project. That was amazing. At this scale, well-received. It kind of, wow, incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, incredibly well. But I think also Amazon did it really well in terms of PR, which is they didn't go really big to the BBC and they got in and yeah you know cnn being like we have a new brand day heads down did the work you know really worked on getting different markets you know to actually use it to make everything very consistent for 18 to 18 months to two years everything is updated and actually just slowly talk about it and i thought it was the best way to actually do it because it showed that there was some sort of confidence in it we don't need to shout yeah because you know it's still the same Amazon is better.

54:02And we can see that in terms of conversion rates, sentiment score has gone crazy and incredible.

54:08Arthur Foliard:Yeah. It feels like Amazon, but it's just, it makes you not even question it. Like you said, like it's not about sort of a rebrand. It's just like, it's just a better version of what they are. And I, yeah, I imagine we talked about before seeing your work all over the place, like seeing Amazon trucks and boxes and all that stuff. The amount of photos I have on my phone. I can't imagine. Yeah, I have no idea. And particularly the first time we saw the new truck, it was actually in New York. Our managing director, Alex, lives a few miles up north in A-Easting on Hudson. And he was just driving and he saw the new logo.

54:44Arthur Foliard:And so he said he actually was with his daughter and they were going to the gym or something. And actually started to follow the van because he really wanted to take a photo of it. I still look at the van being like, this is incredible. It's incredible that this is our work. And when we get the new packaging, you know, you see now the new packaging, they have the blue tape and sometimes they have the teal tape or the orange tape. This is something also that was quite a big change for them because everything was black. And just to say that you see a box and you know if it's prime, if it's retail, if it's pharmacy and so on was sometimes just look at him like, oh my God, you did that.

55:17Arthur Foliard:Yeah, I mean, it's the greatest thrill. I always say the best drug is seeing your work. Yeah. For you guys. And we, you know, packaging. packaging but i also live in a building with like a sort of a doorman and okay you know there's hundreds of amazon boxes just stacked up to the to the brim of the building and i'm just like you know i i could only imagine just how often amazon the funny thing is obviously it takes so long to update all the boxes so the new things they get updated but sometimes you still get an old box and it was like all logo all type all logo it's actually really fun but yeah yeah it's absolutely incredible and we said that to our clients that if they manage to um update all of this you can actually do it it's true that's it's such a good probably new business tool you're like we were able to make the world's fucking biggest like lifts you know in some ways you know like the logo changing is it'll take years to update everything but it still feels like the same lift and better to do that than to not do it just because it would take a long time exactly and but again you need to change it for the good reason you just don't want to say to your brand and just change it because whatever.

56:21Yeah, last question about Amazon, I'm curious here.

56:23Arthur Foliard:Obviously the website is like this experience that can't be touched, right? Was that also established that like the website must be this because it's converting or whatever, like it changes. It's tested to Oblivion, that is absolutely incredible. With that said though, they changed the top face. we have been also working on the text fonts so that will replace all the text really that's a big one yeah so just it's a lot of testing in terms of like how how long it takes to load and we're talking about milliseconds here so it has to be optimized to your movement which is something i really like actually going very nerdy in that type of stuff because we don't do it that much like you do it but not to that extent where if it loads a millisecond lower like you know slower then maybe they've lost like two million dollars.

57:16Arthur Foliard:I was just thinking about that in my head. It's like if Amazon, like say you did something wrong or like it went down for like an hour. We talked about this sometimes. Really? Well, just in telling you, imagine if that, I'm sure it will never go down because they have so many backup, but you think about it. So when we talk about trust, you know, we're really trying just to talk to the right team, the devs, obviously imagine the amount of devs and tests that you had to do, but that felt like exactly what they needed. You're not going to be able to change the layout. and there's some improvement have been made for sure but just to have our tap face and that being replaced across everything even on Prime Video everything has been replaced is funny enough one of the biggest achievements I think that we've made totally yeah I mean that website like it is a symbol of just like effectiveness in terms of design it's just like it doesn't always have to be the prettiest thing in the world no but it works but it fucking works you would assume that give it more space no they have this thing is a dollar per pixel.

58:14They understand exactly that if they push this button here, it's going to bring a lot of conversion. I find that really fascinating because I would say, yeah, data and testing is actually the best thing you can do for a brand.

58:25Arthur Foliard:From an experience point of view, not from a visual identity. I should go. I'm going to go. And very much from an experience point of view versus a logo, a color point of view. So yeah, I trust them on that. As much as we tried, we really pushed the product. But there's a lot of things that they've done in terms of the product where you go on the app and you can swipe different categories and colors are changing. That's a big move as well for Amazon just to know that they can do that. And I know in the future they're going to do more and more because they are increasingly feeling more like a design company in some ways.

59:00This is one of the aims that they have. But, you know, things like that take a bit of time. It's absolutely incredible to think that a client that size, I just managed to actually just get that out. Yeah. Because it's a thing that would take decades. 100%. Actually, they were absolutely incredible. Yeah.

59:18Arthur Foliard:I mean, I'm friends with Tosh Hall from JKR. And, you know, one of the things I've always admired about their, you know, sort of business is like being able to create real change for companies at that scale. Walmart. Yeah. You know, massive. And I worked at Coke for so long that I know it's like so hard to do anything. and change anything and especially put good design into a system that big. It's hard. Yeah, totally. Before we get you out of here, I guess, you know, coming off of this high where you headbutt your sort of colleague and, you know, you've done this, you know, you've done the impossible, you know, you've got Amazon to do good design.

59:56Arthur Foliard:What, you know, what comes next? Because I imagine that opens a lot of doors. I imagine most people are like, to your point, like a lot of what we do is about trust. And it's like, well, if the world's biggest company trusts us, trusts you guys, then anyone should. Have you found that to be the case? Have things started to come from the Amazon? That launched, what, last year? Two years ago? Yeah, actually. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because I imagine having a hit song. We talked about this there. We have Beer on A.O. These are our hit songs. And so, of course, we get new opportunities, new projects, things that come from that.

1:00:34Yeah, we've seen an increase in new business, for sure. But we try to treat every new business with this fresh perspective. I don't want to become a studio that still use Amazon in 15 years. You know, it's the only good things we've done.

1:00:48Arthur Foliard:You know that, right? And some companies are like, I've done this 25 years ago, and it's still the first thing that I show. So obviously, it's also a very different story. It can be intimidating for clients where it's a young startup, and you're like Amazon 18 months and millions of people and they're like we're three people yeah and so we we we play that card obviously very safe but it's it's good in terms of trust they know that we can take you know something that big but we yeah we try to um yeah approach every single project with like yeah we did that but we also did this and we did this and we did this and it was actually quite hard for the internal team we still work with Amazon quite a bit on different projects which is really exciting.

1:01:28But when we finished this case study, which was a lot, one member of the team said, what do we do now?

1:01:36Arthur Foliard:You know, we just rebranded Amazon. What else do you do? Climb the highest mountain. Yeah, and in some ways, we were actually talking to Joey, our CCO and co-founder about it. He was like, you just move on to the next thing. Job's not finished. It's going to be the meme, the whole meme. That's the name of this episode for sure. Yeah, job's not finished. I love that. But it's true because you realize that the next challenge and the next client and the next thing is what you should be focusing on because, you know, the case in this part of the Amazon work is done and we did it really well. And we also want to focus on the new project of Amazon and people that need different challenges.

1:02:14And the great thing is because we know it by heart and we know it upside down, we can actually be really useful for these people. But let's say there's Lyft, there's TripAdvisor that came actually after and other big clients, we want to make sure that we're solely just focused on that.

1:02:28Arthur Foliard:So it's tough. You're only as good as your last album. You know, so you've got consistency. You've got to keep it going. I really believe in this. Yeah, you have that same sickness that I have. That's what we'll come behind. It's an ailment. Yeah, that I'm trying to get a fix with a team of doctors. It's not really working. But yeah, it's never enough and you've just got to keep it going. What do you do for fun when you try to turn off the brain and enjoy life outside of the brand? My son takes a lot of my energy for a good reason, obviously. How does that green point? What's his... Green point?

1:03:04Arthur Foliard:I go to daycare and green points and everything. I try to go out as much as possible and I do a lot of things with my son, try to... Sure. Apologies. Apologies, absolutely. Taikyar Ramirez. We actually went there yesterday. Yes. but to try even to inspire myself a bit differently I try not to look at design on the weekend I used to do that for years and years but now I try to watch movies and it's a bit boring maybe but go to exhibitions, see a lot of friends I find a lot of joy in just going to the park and chilling, having drinks, having a lot of food I'm obsessed with that traveling a little bit when I can But yeah, I feel like work gives me so much joy.

1:03:51And it sounds so cheesy and boring. But I think I found something with Coder New York where I'm having so much fun. And I'm doing incredible. I work with incredible businesses and incredible people that when I go home, I don't feel the need to keep going unless I have to, of course. But when I think about being inspired, when I was younger and I worked at different companies, we won't name them. That maybe didn't inspire me as much. I remember going home being like, I need to do this self project and I need to push myself. And also because I was very ambitious. I feel now it's all about thinking about something else and just meeting friends and being with him and my wife and doing all of that stuff.

1:04:30And that is really nice. And it's a boring answer. I'm really sorry.

1:04:34Arthur Foliard:No, that's a great answer. No, I agree. What we do is we're so lucky, I think, often to do this as a job. And I think you and I see things very similarly in terms of just like it should be fun it should be inspiring and uh i think then try to leave it at the door as much as you possibly can when you can when you can but also just like yeah that's then you don't necessarily need to um i always said my wife should be like oh do you want to do something where you could be creative i'm like absolutely no yeah exactly do you want to do some activities no no absolutely arts and crafts i want to turn that part of my brain fully off and that's why I use reality television or sort of other drugs.

1:05:17Arthur Foliard:But yeah, it's great to meet you. I know we've crossed paths a little bit but we haven't actually had a chance to hang. So that's my favorite part about this podcast is getting to hang. It started really well and then the mustache thing. You lost Kevin with the mustache. I probably should have breathed to you. You gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah, he's still mad. Yeah, no, it's great to meet you. And yeah, Greenpoint, we should have a drink. We should hang. eat some rotisserie chicken for oh the 45 dollar one yeah yeah yeah 77 if you want the full we should go 70 we should yeah yeah yeah okay next time we should do it there at ggs yeah yeah sorry bleep that out kevin i actually went already and how was it it was okay the vibes are great like the vibes are very good and like that's what you're paying for yeah like it's it's a good time and the wine is great but you know it's hard to justify a 45 half chicken and how much how how great can you make a chicken?

1:06:10Arthur Foliard:That's my thing. It's the same with pasta. I love pasta, I love Italian food, but I'm like, how great. Like, okay, you can put some spices, you can cook it in a certain way, but I've certainly had better chicken. Yeah. I'll say that. It's definitely not, I like P.O.P. Peruvian chicken just as much as I like it, but no shade to Gigi's and they're French, so it's easier people. Good logo. Great logo. Yeah, I like the logo a lot. I don't know if we did it, but great job. Yeah, there you go. It all comes back to branding. Yeah. And it's like, you get a good vibe, you get a good logo, then. Yeah, that's it.

1:06:47Arthur Foliard:Yeah, then the$45 chicken. Yeah. It's a privilege. It's a privilege to eat such a high quality. There we go. Hey man, yeah. Thanks for coming by. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's fun. Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. Yeah, of course. It's fun.