Paddy’s day in Quarantine

St. Patrick day - observed every March 17 - is packed with parades, good luck charms, and all things green. The event started as a religious holiday, but over time it’s become a celebration of Irish culture. This year, celebrations were held over various digital platforms because of the global health pandemic. A huge blow to local and global markets and moral of the people who would have planned to be out on the town and spending money.

Celebrated by people all over the world, Paddy’s day, along with countless other holidays have been cancelled. These type of celebrations usually draw huge crowds of people and tourists. With tourists come money and where there is money you will no doubt find people trying to sell something. In the case of St. Patricks day those things are ginger coloured beards and bright green novelty hats among other things to suit the theme.

These small items and trinkets are the topic of my blog today. Anywhere tourists go you will find shops of full of small items and then there will also be items that are much more expensive. Today we’re going to try and learn a bit about the mass produced novelty items that so many people know and love.

I started out doing a bit of googling trying to figure out where the designs come from and I instead came across an article that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me. It talked about licensing product ideas. I had never heard of this before and after looking into it some more, It made sense that the novelty items might be licenced to the companies that produce them.

If you, like me, had no clue what licencing was before, it is actually a really simple concept. Traditionally if you came up with an idea and you wanted to bring it to the world you would have to consider all the steps from manufacturing to marketing and getting shelf space in stores. With licencing you only need to have your idea, and pitch it to a company that already has all of that infrastructure. All you are doing is renting your idea to the company and getting a cut of the profits on that product. (here is a video that helped me understand)

It is not just these novelty products that are licenced, I am sure when you been in a department store you’ve come across standalone product displays with small screen playing ‘as seen on tv’ ads. Those are usually licenced products. The people who came up with the idea more than likely had a problem in their life that they wanted to solve, and often is the case, no more than in class, someone else will be having that same issue and buy the product.

Companies that work with this business model of design licencing or Open innovation, often like working with designers that don’t know the ‘rules’ yet. That usually means students like us. I can understand where they are coming from because some of the things that we come up in our ideation sessions can be pretty ‘out there’, especially at the beginning of the semester in our creativity projects. That said, often times it is a ‘regular’ (not in the design profession) person, that comes up with successful ideas.

I believe that this sort of thing will become ever more universal in the future, sure we designers are great and all, but we would be fools to ignore the way things have been migrating more and more towards open source and individualism / customization.