Rimowa - Pitch and Feedback

Rimowa - It was really interesting for Commission to go through the presentation that they used to pitch for the Rimowa re-brand. Straight off the bat, one of the most interesting aspects was seeing the differences in their initial concepts, and the finished result, Chris addressed this by highlighting that when you’re pitching for a project and you win, that doesn’t mean that your designs will be applied as they are in the pitch, it means that you’ve won the opportunity to further work on it, and in Commission’s case, the project ended up developing in a few ways, a lot of this down to the CEO’s vision for the identity. 

What also really struck me was how incredibly refined and thorough Commission’s presentation was, they created so many different aspects of collateral for the brand, and each was meticulously produced and photographed. They mentioned that they don’t normally do pitches, however this one they couldn’t refuse, and every member of the studio worked on the presentation for 3 weeks solid. 

Pitching my Rimowa Project - I was very pleased  that Commission picked my Rimowa pitch as the winner. I got some really valuable feedback from them, indicating that my pitch was successful because I researched and thought of an original idea and response, applied it effectively throughout various aspects of the collateral and that every aspect of my pitch had thought behind it and rationalisation. It was really encouraging to hear them talk about the way I visually applied the grooves of the rimowa suitcases very effectively, and in a way that hadn’t occurred to them. Also the feedback that they gave me on how I could improve my designs was great as well - they said that the colour I picked were perhaps too bright for a luxury brand, this is something that I was aware, and wary of so perhaps I should have followed my instincts a bit more. They also suggested that the R on the logo which was in helvetica didn’t match the rest of the logo as it was a bit too curved. Finally, one piece of feedback which I found really valuable was when they said that the intersecting W letterform in the logo I created, whilst visually very interesting and well rooted in research, maybe couldn’t be used just because it resembles the VW logo too much. This had actually occurred to me, however I decided it would be fine and that it was different enough. I think while under the blanket of it being a uni project, often real world considerations like this can go astray, however, as a designer heading into the real world now, this sort of thing will have to be something I consider. They themselves said they had a similar scenario when they created a logo for DKNY a few years back which ended up resembling another brands logo too much.