SplashMaps launched Lush’s Tokyo Knot wrap at the lively, colourful Lush Summit in Wapping, London on Wednesday 8th February. Check our film to see the map, the launch and how Japanese and French people do it differently (er… tying knots I mean!).
Since we started work with Lush (full story here), we’ve met with their fabulous UK designers, buyers and inventors! So it was great to meet the wider Lush family from around the world. In particular I met many of the Tokyo team, New Zealand, French and the London and Poole based hosts.
The whole Lush business appears to run on passion and conviction. This was underlined to me when a girl dressed as a daisy bounded up to me, declared her love of maps, then dug around back-stage to find me the right person at their Oxford Street branch.
At the day’s events the normal presentations and events were there (product launches, results, a look at the processes etc.) but the balance was strongly on campaigning, on the business beliefs in animal welfare, peace and promoting communities to grow their own prosperity.
For me the most compelling was the work Lush does in Japan. Naturally Japan is a lucrative market. And it would be easy to look at the 36 million people in Tokyo and see a beautiful sustainable market. Everyone needs soap right? But Lush engenders ethics and perhaps helps invoke a passion in their staff to engage with the plight of the victims of the Fukushima Tsunami and Nuclear disaster. Their buyer in Tokyo, Chemi, made it her own mission to engage with and understand the devastation in the region and the efforts that people are making to put the region back into a prosperous state. Her story is an emotional one and clearly a deep personal journey. The result is that Lush source cotton and rape seed oil from the region; two relatively new products that are beginning to thrive following the general public distrust of agricultural products from a known disaster site. Beyond this, Lush have created a dedicated range of Knot-Wraps, the profits from which will be invested directly into the region.
Following success with Lush on our original designs we’ve had design meetings every 2 months. Together we’ve developed a global style and applied it to our favourite mapping source, OpenStreetMap. These maps are created mainly by local people voluntarily. They’re spookily accurate and very up to date. We used MapBox as a basic style for the content and applied a new colour palette proposed by the design team at Lush.
We’re using Lush’s own local knowledge in each of their cities to put in sites of interest to Lush customers. These include independent record stores and book shops as well as the best of the tourist attractions and the essential transport systems. It’s been great to work with the design team and the team from the Tokyo stores to make this work.
“Tokyo’s the biggest city in the world and one of the most daunting to navigate,” says David Overton, MD of SplashMaps, “We’ve tried to make Lush customers feel as ‘at home’ as possible by putting their favourite things on an easy to use SplashMap Knot-wrap.”
People who attended my talk (Wednesday, 1pm in the Knot wrap room, Tobacco Docks, Wapping) heard our future plans too. They’ learnt about the design principles found in our FREE book “A map for all seasons”.
They were the first to see the new style and the feedback’s been amazing!
Washable, wearable, all-weather worldwide Maps. Experience true confidence in your adventure.
