Are You In Our Time?

Launching a business? Creating or selling a product?

Selling anything requires someone interested to buy.

You can create this need artificially. But that’s expensive. And pointless. The earth, our shops, the seas, are littered with the fruits of that particular endeavour. 

Or you can tap into something bigger. 

Something which is happening irrespective of the products you create. 

There are movements, big and small, which swirl around us. Or, more accurately, we swirl around them. 

People moving from here to there. 

From countryside to cities. 

From east to west and west to east. 

From globally outlooked to nationally scared. 

From things to doings. 

From men to women. 

From analogue to digital. 

From isolated to connected. 

From separate to nature. 

And so it goes on. 

These trends, movements, are bigger than what you do, who you are. 

They guide what we do though and what we think. 

And because we can’t see these trends, we look for objects which make these changes real.

I was in Ireland. 

Lots of change happening there. 

From the gleaming glass towers lining the Liffey to the homecoming. 

Businesses are sprouting. Mega corps are in-coming. 

There is a buzz, an energy, a creativity. 

Ireland is a country which exists simultaneously at home and abroad. Millions have left over the years, setting up roots in countries around the world. In the US. Australia. And beyond. These people all have a connection to Ireland. These people look to reaffirm this connection through culture, through products and services. through the things they buy. 

And when that story of Ireland starts to change, as now, the ‘Irish’ will look for new products and services which embody this changing narrative. 

This will be less about the traditional, the old story of being Irish.

It will be more about the future; the contemporary, the creative, the subtle, the confident expression of a country rekindling it’s place as a trading hub, doing again what it did hundreds of years ago. 

The land fizzes. 

This message of change and hope will filter into the world at large via stories. Stories which come in the form of products and experiences. Products and experiences as messengers from home. Vehicles embodying change and a new narrative.

People will want to buy these messengers from home. 

They will buy them to connect to the changing narrative, the changing picture. 

And in buying them they’ll connect to home, so these messengers, these new products and services, serve a dual purpose. 

They embody the story of a new Ireland spreading out into the world. 

And they offer the willing, those millions of people around the world, an opportunity to connect back to Ireland. 

Products as messengers.

Like Harley. Or Levi’s before.

If you’re creating or selling a product or business, think about and look for the bigger trends that make sense of what you do. Be the product, the brand, the messenger which the culture looks to appropriate because it represents something bigger.