Jim Coudal is a truly inspiring character. His company decided to shift from the standard model of selling their creative services to clients, to a model of creating products which they own and have full control over. And they’ve been very successful at it. Coudal Partners is proof that you can indeed create your own reality.
Thanks so much for meeting with us – you’re a true guru on the topic of creating your own path as a designer and entrepreneur.
It’s something that I talk about a lot. In 2006, I did the keynote at SXSW Interactive. I spoke about firing your clients and making your own clients. In the past 5 years, we’ve seen a lot more small-to-medium size creative studios trying to find their own way and take greater control over the work they do, as opposed to just selling it to somebody on a work-for-hire basis.
With all the tools from the internet at your disposal, you’re enabled to do so much with just a few people.
Yeah, definitely. Manufacturing, distribution, marketing, sales, customer contact – all of that is supremely manageable by a very small team. In the traditional model, you have this big corporation where the creative department is in the back, and they’re those wacky people with the Tabasco ties and chattering teeth in their cubicle, and everybody is a little afraid of them because they’re so “wild.” The rest of the company is the marketing, production, distribution, all of that. Well, our idea was that the little creative team could do everything.
Coudal really does seem to do everything. You have the ad model, you have physical products, you have a consultancy… I’m curious, what came first?
We were a pretty traditional design and advertising consultancy for a long time, 9 or 10 years. We did fairly visible work for a lot of cool clients. We redesigned the Houston Astros’ identity system and all of their uniforms. We worked for national restaurant groups and came up with brand names for restaurants. We also had this Coudal.com site, which was surprisingly popular.
After September 11th, the economy kind of took a dive, and through no fault of our own we lost a bunch of business. Some clients decided not to advertise, or took stuff in-house, or whatever. It wasn’t because we weren’t doing good work; it was circumstances beyond our control. At that point we had to make a decision about whether we were going to continue to chase client work, and ultimately do work we weren’t particularly proud of for people we didn’t really like, or find another way that we could go forward.
The SEED Conference put on by Coudal Partners [photo via flickr]
How did you start to find that other way forward?
We looked at our assets and our liabilities, and we said, “Well, we have this audience that comes to our Coudal.com site all the time, and they must be like us, if they read the things we put up. If we can find a way make, create, sell things that we need, then this audience might need it too.” That was the idea. In 18 months we wanted to have half of our revenue come from things that we owned, as opposed to work-for-hire.
And then nothing happened. It was easy to talk about, but we just went on and did brochures and identity systems for this and that. We also did a series of films with two guys called Slowtron. The films are short profiles of artists and designers, talking about their work. People really liked the videos. They were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. We got a call from a distributor in the UK, who said they might be interested in pursuing this idea as an episodic television show. And we thought “This is it! This is exactly what we wanted – we made stuff on our own, and now here’s this opportunity.”
We were putting together a DVD to send over to the UK, and did a beautiful design for what we wanted it to look like, when we realized that there was no interesting packaging available for CDs and DVDs. They were all crap, like the plastic boxes that you have at Blockbuster. Somebody here had a disc from a European stock photo agency that was in a really sweet case. We took all of the paper out of it, made our own paper, cut it out with an Exacto, put it together and sent it off to the UK. And that’s where that story ends.
Nothing happened?
Nothing happened. We don’t even know if they ever got it, because the guy we were in touch with got fired!
But we thought that it was so hard for us to find a nice case, maybe other people were having this problem. And we’re pretty crafty, so making customized paper inserts wasn’t that big of a deal, but wouldn’t it be nice if all the templates were set up properly and the paper was perforated ahead of time? One thing led to another. We found the company that made the cases, in the Netherlands, and we met with them and made a deal.
That was the beginning of Jewelboxing, this really sweet system for doing a short run of DVD or CD packaging. We launched it, and we made 13 sales on the first day. We thought, “Maybe we’re on to something!” All of a sudden Jewelboxing became the big business. We had a client that was different from all of our other clients – we owned it and could do anything we wanted with it.
Jewelboxing by Coudal Partners
You obviously didn’t stop there, though.
Well, then we wanted to get the word out about Jewelboxing. Not only to the core Coudal.com viewers, but to a larger community who we thought might be interested in it, like wedding photographers and architects and film students. So we started dabbling a little bit in doing online advertising.
It was a total clusterfuck. It was completely impossible to buy the markets that we were trying to buy at any sort of reasonable cost, and the paperwork and research and headaches involved were just a pain. You can see where this is going. We were like, “OK, screw this, we’re going to do it ourselves.”
We talked to Jason at 37signals and our friend Jeffrey Zeldman in New York who runs A List Apart and said, “Look, we’re going to build this little ad network, called The Deck.” It started with us 3, and now there’s 41 properties in The Deck. Last month we served up almost 50 million ads for advertisers like Adobe, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and all kinds of different people.
The Deck, Coudal’s ad network
And then you had two “clients” that were projects you owned and could do whatever you want with.
Right – and The Deck sort of came out of Jewelboxing. We also created a very successful company called The Show, in which we went on tour with bands like The Pixies and Dead Can Dance and recorded concerts. We mixed and matched them and sold specific concert performances from the bands. But as digital music was growing and CDs were waning, we decided that this was going to be a sunset business, so we wound it down.
Then we built Field Notes. Our friend Aaron Draplin in Portland had a goofy idea for this little notebook. We thought it was less than goofy, and we made a deal together and created the notebook. Now it’s in a hundred stores and we sell hundreds of orders every day online. The thing that’s cool about Field Notes is it appeals to a rifle-toting budweiser-drinking mammal killer, AND a coffee-swilling fedora-wearing pretentious Brooklyn hipster. It has a totally universal appeal.
Field Notes now come in limited-edition colors.
So do you only work on your own projects these days?
We still sort of do client work – we do once in a while take on a project if it’s particularly interesting or particularly lucrative.
We have this thing called Layer Tennis, which is a live design event on Fridays. We actually created it way back in 2001 as a total goof. We invited people to play from all over the world and it was a big success. But after a while, a lot of people were copying the concept, and we were doing other things, so we just sort of put it on the back burner.
Then we were dealing with Goodby out in San Francisco on some work for Adobe. They needed something to promote CS4. So we brought Layer Tennis back, and offered it as a sponsorship. In a way Adobe is our client, except rather than us selling our services to them, they’re sponsoring this thing we created.
You’re getting paid to do what you were already doing.
Right – except much bigger now. In the final match we had 40,000 people watching live. So it’s been very good for Adobe as well. We’ve done 2 seasons, and we’ll most likely do another. So now we own this ad network, we have some consumer products, and we do these sponsored web things.
Layer Tennis is a super fun design event by Coudal and Adobe
What’s next?
I don’t know what’s next! It’s kind of a joke, but we’re proudly “without business plan” in our 13th year. We’ve had a lot of things not work, and that’s OK too. If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!
What was the hardest part of building your businesses?
At the point where we made a conscious decision to move away from the traditional work-for-hire model, things weren’t going very well. And nothing gets your attention faster than not having enough money in the bank to make payroll on Friday! But I think that, to a certain extent, you can overcome financial fear with hard work. So just work 12 hour days. So do the fucking brochure. And then get on to what you want to do.
Everything’s not all unicorns and rainbows, and sometimes it’s a little scary, but we are a lot happier than we were in 2001. And there’s something to be said for that.
What’s your advice for people who want to set out on this path?
You need to have the stomach for risk and you need to have good ideas. Let’s just assume that those are the givens, that without either one of those nothing else makes a difference.
I know a lot of people who are in our position, who used to work for The Man or whatever, and now are making records or making films or designing clothes or creating products or screening posters or any of a million other things. And all of them, without exception, all say exactly the same thing and they say it in exactly the same words: “I should have done it sooner.”
When you think to yourself, “In 18 months I’m going to start my crocheted beer coaster company,” the problem with that sentence is the 18 months. What you’re really saying is, “I’m afraid.” Do it now. If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there.