Branded Blog

I have a couch. I realise that’s not really remarkable in the grand scheme of things, but the couch I have is a rather large specimen. A double-jointed 3+2 seater corner-unit large specimen of couch, to be precise. I bought it in Joburg for an enormous open-plan lounge, where it lived in all it’s Milo-brown sueded glory for a couple of years before I fell in love and moved to the Cape. At which point said enormous brown couch had to move to Cape Town too.

Now, being a full Sandton yuppie at the time, I hailed the heroes of Elliots, and hardly noticed when the couch exited my house in Joburg.  And once it got to CT I got photos from a very nervous barefoot man as he watched seven burly Elliots heroes manhandle the couch up and over our 3^rd story balcony to our new, much smaller, flat.

So far so good, all in all.

Until the barefoot man and I decide to move to Kommetjie – near the beach, and really not so far from anything else – but don’t ask a Capetonian, they think they need to pack padkos to come and visit us now. It’s half an hour – used to take me longer to drive the 6km from home to my Bryanston office!

Moving house is an interesting thing, actually, along with all the inherent chaos and trauma and general exhaustingness, it brings to light some interesting philosophical and life experience differences. Not to mention money choices. So while I would probably have opted for even venturing near my cowering credit card to pay someone to do the move for us, the ever-thrifty and phenomenally physically adaptive barefoot man was having none of it – he hired a serious trailer and asked friends with towbars on their cars nicely to come and help us move. And so it was that there came the time to move the couch.

On the up side, the Milo-brown couch does at least come apart into two still large but at lease contemplatable pieces. But both these large pieces still had to get out of the flat, over the balcony wall and down three flights without crashing to little brown pieces at the bottom, breaking any critical wall pieces that the Body Corporate might be unhappy with, or squashing any valuable people underneath.

Easier said than done. So when I came into the partially dismantled lounge in the flat late one night in the midst of our move and found the barefoot man sitting cross-legged on the floor contemplating the two pieces of couch and a mountain of climbing ropes, karabiners, links, loops and all manner of other paraphernalia, I quietly stopped and tiptoed back out the room.

This was not a contemplation to disturb. By the next morning – the feted morning of the moving of the couch – the first and smaller piece of the couch was trussed up in so many ropes and things it looked like it had tried to escape overnight and had been caught in the act.

A little while later the barefoot man’s good friend – the networking photographer – arrived to generously help with the move, both of them stood staring down the couches for a few minutes before suddenly springing into action and hauling the couch to the balcony, balancing it precipitously on the railing and then letting go!

And the ropes held, thank goodness.

And from there on in it was a beautiful thing to behold. With minimal physical exertion and just a little guidance from below, it was a one-man operation lowering that heavy brown block of couch smoothly down the ground, and unhooking all the ropes and gadgets in a few seconds.

A piece of artistry to watch as it unfolded. And a very happy barefoot man once the second part of the couch had followed elegant suit and both were happily ensconced in the trailer and ready to go off to Kommetjie.

All of which, obviously, made me think of brands! Brands can sometimes feel extremely unwieldy, heavy and in the wrong place. And it often seems – especially to those who own or live the brand  & business – that they are stuck with it where and how it is, unwilling to contemplate dropping it off the balcony and hoping that the ropes hold.

So if you’re stuck with an unwieldy Milo-brown brand on the 3^rd floor and you really want to move it somewhere more useful, beautiful and constructive, here’s what I recommend:

1. Get a guru:  A practical guru with the experience, the skills and the tools necessary to help you move your brand. Without a lifetime of rock-climbing; a certified & registered Mountain guiding licence; and the knowledge of knots, weighting and physics that told him how and where all the ropes and paraphernalia should go, it would have been a very high risk operation getting that couch off the third floor balcony. And it certainly would have taken a lot more effort, time and people grunting and pulling and yelling to get the couch on the ground – with no guarantees of it’s state once it got there!  Get the right people in.

2. Figure out where you are:  It doesn’t help deciding to invest and move your brand if you don’t know you’re on the 3^rd floor. You simply won’t be making the right decisions about how to move your brand if you don’t know where it is right now. Find that out first, and then you’ll know what your options are, how much they might cost and how quickly they’ll work. You need to do quite a bit of work before you move anything.

3. Decide where you want to go:  Obvious, but often neglected. It doesn’t help going to all the effort of getting that brand off the 3^rd floor and onto the trailer if you are not really very sure where you’re moving it to. If you think you might want a beach brand the decisions you make around moving it are going to be quite different to those you’ll make if you decide you want a mountain brand. And you’ll waste a lot of time and money along the way if you move the couch first and then try out a few options with it.  Again, do the work up-front. Know what you want to achieve and your chances of doing so –without losing the couch or breaking the bank – are greatly improved.

And the satisfaction of a lovely sprawling couch in the sunshine of a house near the sea is well worth the time spent debating the move up front. A Milo-brown couch in the right place is magical.