Once upon a time…
By Robbie DaleWe love stories at 1000heads.
We also love puns (heck, I do anyway). Which is why I smiled a little when reading about WiTHiNTENT today.
They’re a new company who take the trampled wreckage of tents from festival sites nationwide and turn them into bags and jackets of a distinctly waterproof nature.
This is good for several reasons, and not least because it keeps the landfills just a little emptier. What perks my muffin (as they almost certainly say nowhere) however, is that the end product – your waterproof cape for example – becomes much more than a cape. It’s another chapter of a story.
It isn’t often that I have cause to reminisce about the history of my coat, but were I to find myself in just that situation this week I’d merely be able to weave a simple tale of grinning shop girls, plastic bags and wardrobes. I might have caught it in the doors of a Northern Line train once, but I couldn’t say for sure.
I want my coat to have history. I want to tell people it saw Hendrix when I never had the chance to. I want to surmise that it was used to store dundee cake in a snap storm, rather than keep someone’s socks dry. I’d even settle for it sheltering the conception of twins by a UK/Argentinian couple who would later name them Falkland and Malvinas because they were fun like that.
But this isn’t about tents. Or coats. It’s about giving products that little extra.
It might be a cute history, sure, but it doesn’t have to be.
Maybe there’s a personal touch to the steak you receive from your local butcher; ‘selected by Dave’ you notice, branded on the fat.
Or maybe you find yourself at the start of a story, the cardboard packaging for your latest electronic gadget actively encourages you to turn it into compost and grow yourself a carbon-offsetting tree (and gives you the seeds to get cracking).
Or maybe you’ve simply bought a book with a really good story. It doesn’t have to be complex.
Go on, give it a story. It might just have a happy ending.
