Making of Grad Ball Tour Material

The last graduation ball of the Pink Magazine tour is this Sunday at Chiang Kai Shek. We're taking a quick look back now at Karla Lim's super rough draft of the promotional material.

Magazine Cell Phone Txts

MEG Magazine:

"Hey =) lots of people saw ur stuf, the notebooks and diff bags. So many people askd wher ur stores are haha. Ur stuf are cute!"

E-Magazine:

"Hi gud afternoon. dis s Jhenn of E-Magazine asst. Managing Editor of ms. Abaygar just allowing u to knw na if u dnt mind tom wed. po kmi daan store nyo 4pick up sme of ur product! Pls txtbk"

Ginshari San by San-X

The rice sack packaging for this character, which is supposed to be a grain of rice, made this an irresistible buy for us. Who knew that such crude material would go so well with smooth plush?

He's also got an interesting little story too:

Ginshari San is a little rice grain who is often found at the bottom of the rice bowl. We wonder why he's always found there, we reckon he doesn't want to be eaten. By hiding in the bottom of the bowl, he gets to take a nap and avoid chopsticks!

We're releasing this guy in May.

Crunch Time for Market! Market!

We're supposed to be building a new store in Market! Market! right about now because our deadline for opening is on May 10 of this year. The problem is that all the good contractors are too busy building stores in that new Ayala mall, Trinoma. So everyone is backing out of our project right now.

Construction plans are due tomorrow and we've got nothing! Not even an architect who's available to draw something...anything! Yikes!

Wish us luck.

Almost in Rustan's

Talks with Rustan's are going well so far. We expect to be in five of their department stores by the end of April. So please keep an eye out for our stuff whenever you're in Makati, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Alabang Town Center, Gateway and Robinson's Place.

We'll need your help in challenging Sponge Bob and Dora on their fancy home turf =)

Fat Is Sexy for Toys

We've been noticing that our top-selling toys are usually the chubbiest and the most fully stuffed. Slimmer toys that sell well in small sizes don't do nearly as well when we blow them up to bigger versions. Some have even expressed concern that the less rounder toys weren't "as healthy." Interesting stuff especially heading into these more body-conscious summer months.

Grad Ball Tour Update

Here's the third and final installment of Grad Ball Tour promotional material. The theme is Glitz & Glam for Chiang Kai Shek College. The great design work is by Karla Lim as usual.

Ad Campaign: Adidas

Adidas is making effective use of cuteness for its inspirational athlete storytelling campaign. The best ones feature NBA All-Star player Gilbert Arenas, otherwise known as Agent Zero, and the lovable kids of St. Margarets football team.

MEG Feature in June

We recently caught the attention of MEG Magazine's Shai Lagarde. We've got some items that will be featured in a section dubbed "Cute Stuff" (appropriately enough haha). Here's a cell phone text excerpt:

"We'd love to feature ur new items. Which reminds me, i was meaning to ask if we cud have 15 diff items frm ur store, June is our 9th anniv issue so we're planning to give away prizes to readers who submit letters, poems and essays. The pages would say somethin like, "Congratulations, you each win one of these fab items from It's Cool!" plus info on where the stores are? =) what do you think?"

Convertible Pillows

We love great innovations inspired by simple ideas. A couple of buttons turn a four-legged plush pig into a comfortable flat pillow and vice versa.

New Extras

Aside from releasing the cutest plush toys that we possibly can, we also like to throw in a collection of extras to sell in our stores. These are little knick knack charms that make for feel-good impulse buys. We also get great wholesale purchases from these from customers looking for birthday giveaways, officemate surprises, and barkada (circle of friends) icons.

We've got the following extras upcoming:

1. Birthday Bears + Dogs: Zodiac signs are all the rage in Asia right now. Each month of the year is represented by a bear/dog with a different color and symbol.

2. Poofy Mini Dolls: These were an interesting find actually. We saw them in a shop that specializes in pet animal collars and leashes. The owners just came up with these and were selling them on the side. They were probably inspired by the fuzzy furry love they have for cats (their business cards have a photo of two kittens on them).

3. Glow Zone Critters: Some Korean-designed glow-in-the-dark charms.

New Toys

We've got some great new toys coming up. You may recognize the face pillows from the Soya Bean series of bouncing head pens which were really trendy early last year. Hopefully, the colorful pillow versions will sell pretty well too.

Watch out for these around end of April.

Cell Phone Txt

Do you have this cute hello kitty necklaces? Coz im not sure if thats what i saw in a morning tv show. By the way im veronica. Your stuffs are cute. I like it! *.*

Video: "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service

Leave it to The Postal Service to use a sterile microchip factory to portray sweet unrequited love.

Videos: Beth Orton

Yes, we're biased towards any video that features stuffed creatures. At the end of the day though, "Conceived" like all Beth Orton songs is all about that soothing voice wrapping itself around those lyrics.



"Central Reservation (The Then Again Version)" is a classic for us. It's a feel-good take-on-the-world kinda song. We were surprised to learn that this actually had a video. And a great one at that. Nothing like seeing Beth force a guy into wearing one of her outfits for a spontaneous street dance. Bless you YouTube!

While We're Away...

We're leaving you with a couple of cool music videos of some of our favorite songs . Enjoy!

High Fashion Toy

Here's one of those things that we'd like to believe that we would have made ourselves in another life. It's a shoe by Spanish luxury brand Balenciaga.

Interesting to see how playful luxury is becoming these days.

This design is consistent with creative director Nicolas Ghesquiere's intentions to move fashion fast forward into the future using his personal Eighties New Wave influences.

Thanks to The Cool Hunter for bringing this to our attention.

Off to China

Our team is leaving for China this week. We'll give a full recap of the trip as soon as we get back. A lot of work will be waiting for us too.

On our to-do list next week:
1. Make a new store in Market! Market!
2. Mass produce the new Pathways gift bag.
3. Try to get into Rustan's Department Stores.
4. Build a brand new module for Toy Kingdom Mall of Asia.
5. Finish promotional material for the last stop of the Pink Grad Ball Tour.

See you then! =)

Sketch by Karla Lim

One more cute design proposal from Karla Lim.

Customer Email (Recently Found)

Apparently, when we launched the site, we had some email sent to friends@itscoolclub.com that didn't make it through to us. Belated thanks for the feedback you guys!!!

Here are the two previously lost messages:

"I love your products especially your organizers/notebooks. I bought more than 20 orgs for my girlfriends last december. hahahaha!! Your stuffs are so kikay!! i Just love 'em..anewei do u have like a brochure or pics online of your products....I am looking forward to your new designs!! You Rock!!!"

"Good Even.. In case you would like to make some news announcements & feature arts./ads via web, you may browse www.flipnation.ph . The creator/designer of this website is a former classmate of mine & would like to pass on to others this info.."

Sketches by Jon Bomping

Karla Lim also sent us some work from her friend Jon Christian Uy Bomping. This is his Button Collection which could make for some very nice face pillows.

We may be looking at the very first drawings (Karla's and Jon's) of our future product design directors you guys.

Toy Kindom Picks the Better Design

We were thrilled when Toy Kingdom picked the more unique display shelf design. We believed that this complimented with our items more than the box-type shelf design that we offered as an alternative so this is good news for us.

Again, this is one of those little things that probably only mean a lot to us and not that much to anyone else outside our business haha but to us, a lot of these little things really add up after a while to create really great buying experiences for our customers.

Sketches by Karla Lim

Fresh off her great work for our Grad Ball Tour material, Karla Lim's turning in some promising toy concepts and some tasty proposals for the future.

Nice timing too since we're visiting the factory next week.

Toy Kingdom Displays

Our toys have been available in Toy Kingdom outlets for a while now, but we feel like a lot of our customers don't even know that we're there. It's probably because Toy Kingdom stores are so massive that our products become harder to find inside them.

As a simple solution, we're making our own display shelves to let people know where we are. One option is to focus more on maximizing shelf space (Toy Kingdom charges us a fixed monthly fee for space we occupy) by sticking with a rather basic box design. The second option is to make a more eye-catching but less space-efficient display.

London Underground Art

London loves branding its subway system and this month the city is doing it using the kind of art that we can really get onboard with.

Visit The Cool Hunter for more details.

Grad Ball Tour Update

Here's Karla Lim's remix for ICA's Gypsy Ball.

Historical Horoscope

We felt a surprising sense of nostalgia looking at this It's Cool horoscope feature on Pink Magazine. It actually shows every single product we have had since we opened for business on October 2005.

Look closely and get these items while they last. Most of them will be gone soon. We just realized how much we're going to miss them.

Sketches by Design Supermart

Here are a couple of toy proposal sketches by Design Supermart.

Anything you guys wanna see in the store?

Grad Ball Tour Update

Karla Lim just turned in her work for De La Salle Zobel's Masquerade Ball =)

Musical Toys

We are in discussions with our suppliers on the possibilities of developing toys that are compatible with digital music players.

This is a growing product trend that we're noticing worldwide and we're looking at the kind of quality we can bring to this kind of product before making any final decisions.

We wish the bear above is ours but it's actually by Sharper Image.

Zaha Hadid

Wow!

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center designed by Zaha Hadid.

Sales Force Insight

As we've recently discussed here, we've been working on the design of our packaging to make our products a lot more gift-worthy than they are right now (sorry to our loyal and patient existing customers!). However, even after we start giving out better looking gift bags there will always be an inevitable problem: since we can't forecast all the sizes of all our future products, it's likely that we'll always have off-size products. These products will either be too small (it looks ridiculous whenever you give an item that's far smaller than the gift bag it's in) or too big relative to our standard-sized packaging.

One of our sales people - Juvy from our Eastwood store - proposed a great solution today: invest in gift wrapping paper. It takes care of any possible off-sizes and it's actually cheaper on a per unit basis than gift bags. To avoid the heavy cost of printing our own glossy paper wrap, she proposed picking a nice clean standard design and use sticker seals to brand the package instead. Simple and brilliant.

This just goes to show how much it pays to listen to your ground troops who have the most intimate contact with your customers.

Coffee With Avellana & Associates

Advertising agency Avellana & Associates had a very refreshing presentation this morning on how they wanted to push our brand. The driving theme behind their proposed campaign was to make people aware of our "feel-good" company principles and values.

What we find really exciting is their ambition to not just make it known that we provide the most huggable toys in the city, but also for us to actually make a feel-good impact on our increasingly overworked, overbuzzed and overcaffeinated culture.

It's also gonna be a good thing for this blog if we push through with them because then there's gonna be a ton of cool stuff to write about.

So right now our fingers are anxiously crossed on how much it's all gonna cost (*ahem!* we know they're reading this).

Grad Ball Tour Update

We're excited to have the illustration services of Karla Lim for our Grad Ball Tour material.

Here's a sample of her previous work.

We can't wait to see how she brings our ideas to life.

Fashion Forward

Our parent company runs clothing brands so you could say that fashion gave birth to us.

In the future, we might return to our roots.

What would It's Cool garments look like? It would have the playful tone of Narumiya and the sporty innovation of Y-3 (a collaboration between Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas).

Images taken from Sample by Phaidon Press.

*Sorry for the poor quality of the images. We wanted to scan these pages from the book, but the book was too big.

Grad Ball Tour Update

We've started some work on promotional material for Pink's Grad Ball Tour. Here's an excerpt of an email we sent to a designer:

1. for the tarp, i'm thinking we just keep it cute and basic. see the attached picture titled "Cool Kids." my idea is we replicate this shot in illustration/animated form using the character (maybe a "boy" version of the character can wear a neck tie and a "girl" version can wear a corsage?) or a boy/girl couple that's drawn the same way. then we add just a little visual cue to "personalize" it per school. so for the masquerade, they'll have masks in hand for example. then we put the following quote next to the image:

"and cool kids...they belong together." - Karen O

then finally our logo on the lower right corner.

2. for the table stands, i'm thinking we can do "no awkward silences" signs. like a "no smoking" sign but for awkward silences =) so we just do a nice color illustration of the character or a boy/girl couple with blank stares (refer to attached image "Awkward Silence") on their faces. then once again, visual cue to "personalize" it. then we enclose the image inside a red circle that's crossed with a diagonal line just like the one in the "no smoking" sign. then put the text "no awkward silences" at the bottom of the image. and of course again, the logo =)

what do you think?

Going on Tour With Pink

For this month of March we're hitching a ride on Pink Magazine's Grad Ball Tour. We're going to be contributing to the souvenir gift bags of the following schools:

1. De La Salle Zobel
2. Immaculate Conception Academy
3. Miriam High School
4. Chang Kai Shek

Definitely hope we can do our part in making these nights a bit more memorable for everyone.