Brian Collins on Fighting Second Dragons, the Power of Orange Ties and the Future of Creativity

0:06Katy Cowan:Today's guest is Brian Collins. And if you've worked in branding for more than two minutes, you've probably heard the name. Co-founder of Collins, the blokes worked with Spotify, Nike, Dropbox, basically all the cool kids. But don't let the big names fool you because Brian's not here to rattle off the portfolio. He's here to talk about courage, curiosity, and why we should all be asking better questions, including the ones we're a bit scared of. We got into his Irish roots, why orange is the colour of transformation and what happened when he wore a giant cravat to school. There's also poetry, family, a bit of Leonard Cohen and some very strong feelings about Oreos.

0:44Katy Cowan:It's a big-hearted, honest and very funny chat with someone who's been around the block, asked the big questions and come back with even better ones.

0:56Katy Cowan:This season of the Creative Boom podcast is proudly sponsored by James Cropper, the last mill standing in Britain for premium coloured paper. Its new colour source range puts designers first, giving you direct access to 50 stunning shades in a range of weights and textures straight from the mill. Incredible colour crafted in the Lake District and delivered straight to your door. Discover the paper that brings your ideas to life via paperandpackaging.jamescropper.com

1:33Out of curiosity, were you sick? Did you have an accident?

1:36Katy Cowan:I did, yes. What happened? What happened to you? I was on the floor most of last year, so I herniated a disc in my back on my lower spine. I know, it was so horrendous, Brian, honestly. um I think I went through an acute phase for about six months it meant I couldn't sit I couldn't sleep I couldn't stand I couldn't I couldn't do anything my whole life was taken away from me so all the things that I had planned which was in you know there was a I think I was coming to Barcelona and I was going to interview you um it all just got put by the wayside but I carried on running creative beam throughout all of that and I'm only now 20 months later just getting back to normal oh my god it's been quite horrendous i don't know if you've touch wood ever been through something like that but it really wow it's one of those things i think our lives continue and then all of a sudden the life we had and the life we're now currently living it can happen it can happen with an accident happen with a slip it can happen with a phone call right yeah in my case it happened several years ago they found something in the back of my neck and i went in and they and they discovered it and uh they were like this is not good um it's not really good it was friday um we're gonna send you first thing monday morning to this specialist to take a look at it oh gosh on the morning so it's friday noon they got me to see an incredible specialist on monday morning but on that friday night saturday night and sunday night i had to think like i'm gonna get some bad news on monday yeah what horrible thing but the thing about it was like what am i going to do so some people go oh now i the life i was living i don't have to change my life i'm going to go climb machu picchu i'm going to open up i don't know i'm going to become a writer i'm going to open up a cupcake store god knows i want to do the thing i've always wanted to do and i realized that i just wanted to continue to do what i was doing yeah yeah and i'm like go to the second go for a walk no no no no i want to continue to work at collins i wanted to show up on monday morning after I went to the appointment I'm like what after I had my check my my uh not the um the uh the uh the appointment and after they did the test I made all sorts of appointments in the afternoon so I could continue to do my work wow because then I realized if if I get bad news it was it was a weird epiphany I'm like I want to continue to do what I'm doing yeah like I was like time's up you know that was and like that's it and you get like we're all you know we all run out of time yeah but all of a sudden you're confronted with it you know in here's and here's the deadline and your plans might have changed and I said my plans may have changed but I want this is what I want to do I don't want to suddenly you know certainly you know start go off and you know um you know raise barley in Vermont I I wanted I wanted to continue to do this so it was a weird blessing that I felt I was surrounded by people I loved I loved my work I love this company I love design I love this community I love this I like everyone in it um some more than others but for the most part um I felt like oh I want to continue to do what I've always done and that was a weird weird like I couldn't get wait to continue to do what I love to do that's amazing that's amazing.

4:58Katy Cowan:I think that's exactly what I went through. There was like an epiphany where you go through all this hardship and pain and suffering and you lose so much of what you once had. But when you start to slowly get it back, it's incredible. The courage you suddenly have, the confidence, the gratitude. And then yes, that realization, oh God, I love what I do. And I'm not going to let fear hold me back anymore. I'm not going to let other people hold me back you know it was kind of like a watch out world i'm coming back out you know this is my moment and that's how i felt you know it's been really liberating on the flip side positive experience that's great well i'm sorry well welcome back yeah and you're okay the health is fine oh it's it was it was it was completely benign it was like you get nothing you get nothing to worry about it and i get i got nothing that was but for the moment i was like whoo and then i said no it was completely been i was nothing it was a it was um yeah it was it was like it was just zip so that was fantastic did you give it a name no i didn't get a name but it was removed in the back of my neck and some people go like you have a big scar back there i'm like yeah story there's always a story behind us yeah but now but now like i'm at the gym and i have weird i'm in my 60s and i have zero cholesterol don't ask me because half of my diet is oreos so you know i have an irish diet which involves carbohydrates and would you like more fat with that brian we get some butter would you want more fat we'll boil something for you and you can put fat on it and we want some more fat with your fat please all irish people eat is carbs bread and butter and tea like that's all we that's all we eat that's brilliant and somehow both my parents made it until their mid-90s wow do you know what it is it's irish stock brian i know we just keep on going it's crazy we're incredible you know i have a great grandmother who is in the world um book of records guinness book of records for having the world's heaviest triplets no one's beaten her no one well that was random i heaviest triplets here's the resilience is extraordinary so my mom died when she's 92 i buried my both my parents were it was a strange thing but they both went within six weeks six weeks of each other my dad 94 my mom 92.

7:18I was with my mom to the last few months a slight dementia started kicking but she was like sharp as a tack the last night before she went I went to her house on Cape Cod which which where she lives a little cottage on the sea um thank goodness for Ogilvy and my salary there I could pay for a lovely house and she wanted a cottage on the ocean and uh I went to go tuck her in um And my sister had dressed her and got her ready for bed. And she just finished watching her episode. Every night she watched Murder, She Wrote with Angela Lansbury. I would watch it with her.

7:53Katy Cowan:And I would watch it with her. Yeah, the last few weeks. Because I spent the last few weeks with her. And I said, you ready to go to sleep now? She said, yeah. Well, you used to tuck me in like this as well. She said, yeah, I know, Brian. I love you very much. I said, Mom, I love you very much, too. Good night. And I'll see you tomorrow morning. But is there anything else I can get to you? Is there anything else you need? you know before i go home and before you go to sleep and she goes yes brian i need a man

8:24i wasn't expecting that no no good night no this is what was coming in out of dimension but at that moment my mom like i think many irish people when it gets too earnest they like go too much too much and my mom felt too earnest the joke was yes brian i know it's a special moment what do you need i need a man um she you snap back into sort of the kind of whimsy that my my it was filled with in my family a very serious moment and she pulls it like she pulls a joke yeah so and that and that was that was my last conversation with her and she was gone the next morning oh what was her name mary collins mary there's always a mary burn mary burn yeah so yeah but but she's you know she was she was great and to have a mother who encouraged that kind of creativity was a blessing what did she teach you uh well my mom was a high my mom was a my mom had her uh her master's in in childhood education she went to boston college she studied education.

9:33So she was a school teacher. So she, I learned how to read before I got into school. So, and that accelerated everything by the time I got to elementary school, because I was reading, you know, in kindergarten, because she just taught me how to read. And I love to read, because I like, I like to figure, I want to know what the pictures were saying. And I, and then she always encouraged whatever part of me, both my parents did, whatever part of me was expressive. I liked to paint. I liked dance. I liked theater. I liked to perform. I liked to write. I liked to read. I liked to draw. All the things that were creative, both my parents were endless cargos of encouragement.

10:14And when a father, an Irish Catholic father finds out his son likes to dance and perform and likes opera when he's like seven and eight years old, most fathers are like, well, we'll see about that. But no, my dad got me a tutor when I was 11, who is a professor of romance languages at Harvard. And he would take me to the opera and he'd take me to galleries and take me to museums every Saturday when I was a kid from like, from the fifth grade until through high school. Cause my father didn't come from the arts, but he knew that I had that, he knew I was fascinated by those things. So I had a tutor that took me into across Massachusetts and Boston almost every Saturday.

10:55And we would visit museums and the opera and theater and poetry readings and so i had the benefit also of growing up in boston which is a community that encourages encourage that kind of um creative self-exploration or yeah i was never

11:11Katy Cowan:told what i was doing was either weird or strange or that's good yeah i was really lucky no one ever said yeah that's weird i'm like oh they say that's weird they'd say you're weird i'm like damn right yes gotten that correct that's what i say to my nephew because he said that to me he's like you're weird and i went good because i'd hate to be normal right and so um i was told that fitting in and conforming was probably the wrong path and all my brothers and sisters are like this as well so we my parents would never worry about fitting in how many brothers and sisters do you have there are five of us so typical of that kind of family and catholic as well no i live in new york and they all live you know well i think 10 no 10 miles of where we grew up so up in boston but and i have a house up there in boston um as well but that kind of environment where you were encouraged to pursue your own questions and chase your imagination are i just thought that's how most most of the kids in my neighborhood were also raised in similar ways and i didn't know that that was i didn't i thought that's the way kids were raised was were your parents were your parents immigrants or was it their parents their parents were all from ireland right so it was probably instilled in them to work hard and make the most of opportunities yeah it was and but the the thing that's interesting is my parents on both my parents side um especially on my mom's side is my grandmother was a musical for so she played the piano she played the accordion and she could to play a harmonica.

12:45She was a genius and came to music. She could just write and play it. And so I grew up in a house filled with music and I danced as a kid. So my brothers and sisters learned how to dance. And so when you grow up in a house with music and then you dance all across the floor, that changes. Because even if you're like my uncles and aunts dance badly, but you just did it. It didn't matter what noise you made. You just did it. So that being encouraged, just whatever you, you don't know how to sing, but you can dance. Okay. So dance. You don't know how to play the piano so you can sing. So sing. So growing up in a musical house kind of change, like is, it's a way to be present in the way that you like, okay, you don't sing.

13:30You can't tell a story, but you can dance or you can't really tell a story, but God, you know how to play a harmonica. So everyone brings, or you can't do anything, but you can clap or you can hit your knees or you can applaud and you can

13:41Katy Cowan:participate and you and no one's ever left out yeah that's lovely rooms made for everybody right so it's not just the audience and someone performing it's everyone's participating so my family always even when we had guests we always made sure that they always felt like they were that they belonged did you have to do turns at christmas do what so in our family we had to do a turn at christmas on christmas day so everybody had to get up and perform so it might be a poem or a dance or a song or a play no no it wasn't that prescribed we didn't have to go now you know you it just would happen my grandma would be there she'd start playing the piano someone start singing and it would just happen or it didn't happen but it was never now we'd start performing at 10.

14:26yeah so one of the things that we do now um at collins treehouse in woods hole is whenever we have an event there we're friends i always have our irish musicians come and play folk tunes and they play some ancient cultic music and they play popular music but it's all acoustic um violins drums mandolin guitar um piano um but we have there's always when there's this people there's always um we try to have a lot of music in the house it changes everything it sounds like you're really proud of your heritage it's fuel that's all it is you know if you look back and you try to preserve it. I don't want to put in amber and then it becomes shellacked.

15:08But you use it as like, well, I knew what that was like. I know what music does to change a room. I know what certain kind of music does. It has a rhythm that has a beat that makes you want to dance. I know how that can change the energy in a room instantly. So it's that knowledge that's more interesting to me than the heritage. So you can bring that heritage forward and you bring it into a room and people go, this is great. I'm like, well, my grandparents taught it to me. So that's where heritage makes sense because you bring it for it. You know, you just don't put it, you don't put it in a box and say, oh, who cares?

15:41But if you know how to turn it into something that can, you know, light up a room, then that's, you know, that's fun.

15:50Katy Cowan:Have you been back to where your Greek grandparents were from in Ireland? Yeah. Where was it? Yeah. So my grandparents were from, were from Wicklow, Kinsale, the Aran Islands and Kark. Wow. So, yeah, but I've been to, I have stones from my grandfather's farm in Wicklow. Oh. That are great. Yeah, being able to see, I mean, the voyage that those men and women made, particularly my grandmother on my mother's side, a lot of them would go, they'd come to the United States in the early, this is, my grandparents all migrated here in the early 20th century. that voyage that they made. So I interviewed my grandfather when I was in sixth grade because that was part of our history class.

16:39And I remember him telling me that he was taken, he took his crate that he had with everything he was going to bring home. He was never coming back. This is in 1918. His family gave him money. His mother sewed two British crowns inside his leather jacket. So he was mugged. He'd still have money, right? Put his crate, went to Galway in a cart, like with horses, okay? Went to Galway. But before he left, he went to his parish priest and he had a quick mass. And his parish priest gave him a blessing before he left for America. Yeah. Right as we were building Collins Treehouse, My aunt finally passed from the family home in Boston.

17:28And we were digging out an attic. And then we forgot there's an attic above the attic that we had never been into in maybe 50 years. And we found a crate. And my sister Jeannie said, I think I found Grandpa's crate. Are you kidding? She said, nope. She called me. She said, it has these tickets from Galway on them. And we opened it up. And it was my grandmother's wedding dress. So she has the wedding dress and a clipping from the South Irish, so the South End News, which is an Irish neighborhood in Boston. And it was a front page that Mary and Jim Byrne were getting, or Mary Manning and James Byrne were getting married.

18:12So I have that crate in my house in Woods Hole. And my grandfather's entire world, when he was 17 years old, went into that crate. and so it's now in my house so the journey that they made um and just left their family behind he went back on Aer Lingus in 1966 when they had jet service between Shannon and Boston they didn't do Shannon in New York they did Shannon in Boston because that's interesting yeah and so he went but he had not been back there in 50 years wow so um yeah so that was quite that was quite a thing but But we're, you know, all of our ancestors, at least here in the United States, we're a country of immigrants.

18:54Katy Cowan:Yeah. But that trip and that decision to leave their world behind. It's one of the reasons why, in fact, I think, at least in what we do at Collins, is to hear someone's an accent here in the United States means that you've made a journey from leaving wherever you are to come here. And you're from another world, you're from another place. and so I'm always fascinated by the people who are different than we are not the same so I think you know that kind of those kinds of differences are that kind of variety the kind of different perspectives is what I've tried to generate because I'm more fascinated by people who are not like me than people who are like me and so when I hear acts you know an accent from someone like you made a journey from someplace else you made a decision to leave wherever you're from for something different, hopefully something better.

19:44So in that decision, to redesign your life, that's a big choice. So I'm always dazzled by either my students, my graduate students, or the members of my team who are from anywhere from South Africa, from France, from India, from China, from Singapore, from Korea, and even from Scotland, because I don't think they speak English there. But anyway, but I love that real rich tapestry. Makes for really interesting people, makes for an interesting community, and I think makes for more interesting work because people come from different experiences, right? Someone from India is going to grow up with entirely different aesthetic and narrative range than someone who grew up in Connecticut.

20:37Katy Cowan:Yeah. It's a leap of faith, isn't it? to change your life it's a huge leap of faith and when and when you make that leap all the other subsequent leaps are easier to make you know my angelou said courage is the first of all the values because they enable all the others so your first valley and the most important one is courage courage yeah it's the first yes you talk a lot about courage actually don't you it's kind of one of the recurring themes i think it gets back to as a creative person you have to you have to be true to yourself. You're trying to be true to yourself because if you're not careful, you can spend a lot of your career or maybe in your life answering somebody else's questions instead of answering your own.

21:20So, and in my mind, I'd sooner risk failure chasing my own imagination than trying to chase somebody else's. So that's what Collins is about. So, and I learned that through a number of different experiences or a number of opportunities were presented to me at some amazing companies when I was at the 10 years that I ran design and brand in the innovation lab at Ogilvy. Every two years, I'd get an amazing phone call. One, like every famous brand that I admired in the world, I'd get a call from the CMO or the CEO. And every time I would come back, I'm like, you know what, that's good. But I have at Ogilvy, I get to create every day.

22:03It's like it's it's IBM and then it's Vera Wang or it's National Geographic or it's Coca-Cola. And so I got to it was a giant toy box, you know, and then so I got to build an amazing team in Los Angeles and then in New York. But it was our team. And then and so I decided that kind of ability to experiment and make interesting things. instead of just answering one question, we can answer lots of people's questions. And then learning how to answer your own question and chasing your own imagination, and then learning how to help other people chase their own imagination, not just as creative people or strategists or writers or business leaders.

22:45Like what's important to you? That turns out to be a transitive skill for our clients because they're chasing like particularly CEOs and founders and CMOs, they're chasing their own imaginations and their vision of the future as well. So as it turns out the decision for me to find out whose questions am I answering? It turns out to be the transitive value for the questions you're working with your clients is they want to build something that's meaningful for them. So that's what we do. We try to make sure people are finding ways to, you know, chase down their own imaginations.

23:18Katy Cowan:So it's rather than just answering a brief, it's saying, well, hang on a second, let's break this down and ask more questions and figure The brief is just the beginning. The brief isn't a problem. It's just the beginning. It's just the beginning. Every project we've gotten where we've become well-known, we've always went back and said, there's always a question under the question. My team reads Beowulf, and the Seamus Haney translation, which is the best, and there's a reason he won the Nobel Prize in poetry, is in Haney's book, Beowulf, which is an incredible the first epic poetry poem in English he talks about Beowulf has to go and defend a city from being attacked by a horrible monster, Grendel who comes up out of a lake he goes and kills Grendel almost gets killed in the process saves the city, saves the king he wins the king's daughter he wins a bonus and he is freelancers by the way, the original term for freelancers um save the city and then they rest and they go to sleep and then something even worse comes out of the out of the lake which is grendel's mother and she's the original swamp thing and she is really pissed off so um there are always two dragons there's a dragon that presents itself oh i'm the problem but if you pay attention to only that dragon which is what people are presenting to you then you're not there's always another problem lurking under the problem and if you don't start finding out what that is, you'll end up chasing the wrong problem.

24:54You end up solving the wrong problem. Like years ago, Spotify said, we need a new identity system. They've been through three or four different agencies. And they said, it isn't your identity. It isn't your visual language. If you think of yourself as a screening service, as an engineering company, you're talking about download speeds and building a playlist. No one's waking up worrying about your engineering or download speeds. They're wake up wondering where Beyonce is.

25:22Katy Cowan:Yeah, exactly. So you're not an engineering or streaming company. You're really a music company. Be the music company because people want to build a personal soundtrack to their lives. Stop talking about download speeds and start talking about David Bowie and Cardi B. Exactly. And then they had all the cameras, which is what bad advertising agencies do is they take picture of the consumer. We call it mirror marketing. Oh, they'll like this. And like, why are you painting? Why are you pointing the camera at the audience? Point it at the stage. People want to see Katy Perry. You know, they don't want to see a bunch of kids cavorting in Reykjavik at two o 'clock in the morning.

26:01They might, but the musicians hold the center of the conversation. So, and that was a self-conceptualization. That wasn't a design. Well, it was a design problem, but they want us to solve a graphic design problem. Like, no, it's a self-conceptualization program. You guys think you're selling, you know, streaming engineering, and no one cares about your streaming service. They care about music. So you should behave and look and sound and do things that a music company would do and look like one. But had we solved the original brief, we would have vanished like there are three other agencies. But we said, wait a second, you're asking us to solve the wrong problem.

26:39You're actually not a technology company. You're a music company. Yeah. That might sound strange, but it shifted them internally. So clever.

26:47Katy Cowan:It's so simple. But, you know, I think people get so wrapped up in something, don't they? They can't, when you're in and amongst the storm, you can't see the clearing beyond. It ends up being that sometimes you need that clarity from somebody else to say, well, hang on a minute. Let's just go back to basics and think about what it is that we really are. how do you deal with that when you're you're talking to very i presume very intelligent people at spotify who haven't been able to sort of work it out for themselves really i guess well my co-founder leela mashmeyer um well i should really speak to this because he was you know really crucial in like really getting at the heart of the question but when you see really smart people and by the engineers of Spotify are the best product engineers in the world that I'd ever met because they figured out Daniel Ekenstein figured out how to stream music in a way after he's seen what happened with Napster and Kazaa after they saw what happened with that he goes I think I know how to save the music industry by giving something people to people that's so good they'll pay for it and he was right is that sometimes we're so close to what we make that what we make is meaningful, but might not be relevant.

28:05Like that was meaningful to us, but might not be relevant to other folks. And so you end up selling what you make instead of selling what people need, or you talk about what you've made. And so, so like the, the, the product is brilliant engineering, but the need is being able to listen to my music where, and whenever I want. And so in particular, when you have brilliant engineers, they're so focused on the product, which is what makes them entirely viable is they sometimes have to be reminded that there's a story that has to be told and people don't buy engineering they buy the benefit you don't buy the product you buy the outcome you buy the benefit you buy the story same things with brands you don't drink the beer you drink the brand you know so that a niche and the engineering will capture the early audience but a brand will capture the larger audience can capture the mass market because you need to speak to a larger idea that's beyond the technology itself.

29:03And that requires work. That requires the curiosity to go and ask lots of questions, particularly if you look at a history that a brand might have had and say, well, this isn't working. So let's not continue to repeat this. What else can we do? And what are people really looking for that we can uniquely provide? And what's the story? What was the bridge to that? And that's the conversation. The puzzle with designers is we so want to answer the problem and we're usually so adept at making things that we get, wow, that's a great logo or that's a great interface. Those colors are great or that's a great restaurant designer.

29:36We know how to make stuff quickly as we can sometimes convince ourselves that the aesthetic solution is the right solution because it looks good. But we might be answering with a beautiful identity or beautiful design system. we might be doing a beautiful answer for the wrong story. We might build a ladder, but it might be up against the wrong wall. That's why strategy here and our writers, we spend a lot of time making sure that we are really answering the problem under the problem. We're trying to find the second dragon, not the first one, but there's always a second one. And the second one, you either have to take it out for tea and make it your friend.

30:20you have to tame it or in some cases you literally have you have to you have to call it out and slaughter it um wow so but you have to be aware of what's the conversation that that isn't being had what's the and you have to listen for what isn't being said because sometimes what isn't being said is as important as what they're saying so and we find that again and again and we usually carefully diplomatically say you say this is the puzzle but and we'll solve that but maybe this is the puzzle and that's when we've always made a leap brilliant oh there's a larger problem here yeah and here's how we can probably solve that larger problem and if you solve that problem then you solve a smaller one there's a great quote that i love that we um of all place let me see if i can find it oh this is listen to this it was great he said so one of the most incredible leaders of the 20th century during World War II, along with Roosevelt, Churchill, and de Gaulle, was General Eisenhower.

31:27And when asked about his success, here's what he said. How did he succeed? He said, whenever I run into a problem I can't solve, I always make the problem bigger. I never solve it by trying to make it smaller. But if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution clever i never solve it by trying to make the problem smaller but if i make it big enough i can begin to see the outlines of a solution so you take this and you try and make it bigger and the process the process of solving the larger problem you'll solve the smaller one so always ask always ask the next question the next question why are you doing this why are you doing this why has that happened and then you start to get some some real answers instead of just taking what's in the brief you really have to carve into the brief otherwise you're just you might be solving a cosmetic problem and designers loves we love it because we're good at it but but you're leaving a huge opportunity on the table yeah exactly and there must be so much