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Solutions December 2005
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PROFILE
Cool
Idea + Good Caffeine = New Biz
Half
of Coudal Partners’ revenue
is generated by brands it has
created quickly, including these
two:
Product:
Limited-edition, professionally
mixed and mastered, custom-designed
live performances on CD
Background:
On a Thursday night in December
2004, Jim Coudal, Coudal Partners’
founder and one of its partners,
received a call from Jake Walker,
who had left a firm called DiscLive
that records and burns bands’
shows and sells them on the spot
to fans. Part of Walker’s
job was to supervise recordings
of the reunion tour of the Pixies,
the favorite band of several Coudal
Partners’ employees. “Working
with them would have been a dream
project for us, so I was all ears,”
Coudal says.
The
Pixies had booked Walker and his
business partner, Eric Welsh,
to record and sell the band’s
final 12 shows, but the partners
aimed to give concertgoers something
new. Walker called Coudal to brainstorm
ideas. “We didn’t
sleep all weekend, put a plan
together and began a new company
Monday morning,” Coudal
says.
Coudal
and Walker decided most concertgoers
would trade instant gratification
for better-sounding recordings.
Companies that provide instant
CDs record the house mix directly
from the soundboard. Time-strapped,
those firms often sell discs with
generic covers and no track listings.
By contrast, The Show records
the soundboard’s output
with a ProTools setup, preserving
the independence of different
channels so they can be mixed
and mastered later at Welsh’s
Chillhouse studio in Boston. The
Show also uses the same manufacturing
process employed for retail CDs,
which has advantages over high-speed
CD-burning technology.
Result:
Only a handful of CDs remain from
the 12 shows recording on the
Pixies tour, and those were pressed
in runs of 1,000 or more. Last
spring, The Show made discs of
13 European concerts for its second
client, Dead Can Dance, and sold
out a 500-copy pressing of every
one.
In
May, Walker moved to Chicago to
work more closely with Coudal
Partners, and Coudal says The
Show is close to signing other
bands for tours in 2006. “We’re
essentially making another product
for ourselves—something
we’d want as consumers.
We know many people who regularly
visit Coudal.com will feel the
same.”
Product:
Politically themed T-shirts for
kids
Background:
One evening at the dinner table,
a month before the 2004 Presidential
election, Jim Coudal’s 7-year-old
daughter said she’d like
a shirt saying, “I won’t
vote for Bush. I can’t,
but I wouldn’t if I were
you.”
“We
left for the day, came in the
next morning and had a new company
with a logo, site and products
on the way,” says Bryan
Bedell, a designer at Coudal Partners.
“Jim is actually one of
those little gnomes that, back
in the day, would fix shoes for
a cobbler all night.”
One
Coudal Partners employee worked
on the company’s identity,
another worked on two shirt designs
(“I wouldn’t vote
for Bush if I were you”
and “Mommy wants a new President”),
another built the web site and
another worked with a firm called
Threadless to produce the shirts.
The company began operating 15
days after the dinner.
Result:
As expected, Lowercase Tee attracted
positive and negative feedback
nationwide. It broke even. Bush
won.
Fooling
Around Pays Off
“It’s
amazing how the seemingly pointless,
fun things we do start out or
end up translating into actual
paying work,” says Bryan
Bedell, a designer at Coudal Partners.
He acted in “Copy Goes Here,”
a short film written and directed
by his co-worker, Steve Delahoyde.
“Even though we’ve
all been involved in shooting
TV commercials, this is the first
time we’ve done anything
quite like this entirely by ourselves,”
Bedell says. “Hopefully,
the skills we’re learning
will transfer into more flexibility
to serve our clients and our sub-businesses.”
Here
are two ways Coudal Partners expects
to gain leverage from the film:
1.
“We’re contracted
with an old-line American company
to help them reposition its brand,”
says Jim Coudal, the company’s
founder and one of its partners.
“One way we want to do that
is producing a series of short,
sequential spots that will be
similar in structure to the scenes
in “Copy Goes Here.”
He’s taking mental notes
about ways dialogue, lighting
and cinematography work in the
film.
2.
Coudal.com generally gets more
page views when the firm creates
or promotes a film. “When
we draw people to the site, it
exposes more potential clients
to our brands like Jewelboxing
and The Show,” Coudal says.
The buzz also leads more people
to subscribe to the company’s
email newsletter (called Infrequent
Newsletter) and its automated
email feed of blog entries.
