6 Framework Questions for Curating Quickly (Curation Series, Part 3) 

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The world-famous architect Frank Gehry uses them. 

So do Spielberg and Scorsese. 

Even Da Vinci used them. 

Whether it’s Frank Gehry hand sketching the Guggenheim, Spielberg storyboarding his next film, or a fashion designer penciling her concept for a new fall line, everyone starts with a framework, a blueprint, a pattern that brings their projects to life. 

And it’s no different for us in the branded merch business.

But if you were to ask most professionals in this business (who work on projects all day long for clients) if they have any type of process for unlocking great merch ideas, most will mumble through a few vague notions, but hardly anyone can pull out a simple half-sheet and say, “yes, here’s my framework that allows me to quickly unlock each project - no matter how small or large.” 

But most of us do have a framework in this industry. It’s a very dated framework that gets passed around by osmosis and it’s used by virtually everyone in the business. Unfortunately, that uninspiring framework looks like this: 

• Item

• Imprint

• QTY

• In-Hand Date

• Budget 

That’s it. That’s the whole framework. 

Prior to 2020, “item, imprint, QTY, in-hand date, budget” was the criteria that drove our projects.  

But that’s not good enough anymore. 

There’s much more to the work we do now. 

And so much more to the work our clients expect us to do. 

There’s design, kitting, packaging, distribution, not to mention the crucial aspect of higher expectations from the client on creativity, utility, and sustainability. 

Much of what we do each day out of habit is merely rapid-response muscle memory. We react. Respond. Reply. All-day long. It’s a game of fast-action zooms, hack slacks, text replies - a flurry of flailing hands and impending deadlines. Curating ideas for a client under the old framework of factory specifics only isn’t enough to achieve their goals nor unlock your best work. Those specs are important, but they are not the most important parts of the conversion anymore. We need to ask those spec questions but those questions should fall toward the end of each project’s discussion, after purpose and intent, not at the beginning, and we need to make this a part of our new muscle memory.

To do so, we need a new framework, but an easy framework that allows us to fill in the blank for our clients while duplicating this effort into a scalable creative brief that we can use with every client. And the simplest -and most effective way- to unlock any project with a customer is simply to ask questions. Questions open your client’s mind. Questions force clients to look at you beyond the box they’ve shut you in. Questions engage your customer in a more imaginative and intelligent discussion, positioning you as someone who cares about the outcome and their priorities. 

And in the spirit of commonsku’s always-striving attempt to improve our work and elevate our industry, we’ve created six questions you can modify to create a simple framework for you and your team: 

Q #1: Who’s the Rejoicer? 

How unexciting is the phrase “end-user?” 

We bandy around that phrase because it’s an easy language handle for us to grab, but it’s full of implications. Referring to our ultimate appreciators (our audience) as a user is just … crass. It’s crass because it’s heartless. And if it doesn’t inspire you it certainly won’t excite your customer. 

Think that language doesn’t matter? 

One small example: At commonsku, you’ll never hear us refer to our customers as a “tenants,”  though it’s a ubiquitous term in SaaS world. Our clients are entrepreneurs, real people with families, employees, and individual passions - reducing them to a tenant diminishes an individual into an amorphous entity. That attitude pervades everything in your culture: IT, sales, marketing, accounting. 

How we refer to those that are the most important to our business sets the tone and permeates everything we do. When we talk with our client about the audience we serve, the questions we ask should evoke the very sentiment our product is built for: joy. 

Who’s the rejoicer? Who receives this item? Who loves it so much they covet it, guard it, and carry it into their lives?

For some of you, “end-rejoicer” might be a big high-and-mighty, a reach, but what we want to do with our words is shift our client’s perspective. We want to change their attitudes about needing “something to give away to our employees” to an attitude that ignites excitement, energy, and evokes happiness. 

Who’s the rejoicer?

Q #2: What’s your intent? 

As a former distributor who focused on company stores, I found that a simple shift in how we talked about our projects with customers changed the entire tone of our relationship. It affected everything, from small technical decisions to even margins. 

For example, when I shifted how I spoke to prospects about stores by changing the words I used from the utility of what we could do (“yes, we can build a company store for you”) to the aspiration of why we do what we do (“yes, we’d love to help you create brand champs, raving fans, etc”) - it changed the tone of the conversation. We were no longer configuring a colorless world with technical jargon, we were creating affinity with the brand and drawing a direct connection to the brand’s intent. 

And we were changing our client’s opinion about our value prop, elevating it from a task that anyone could do to a mission that we alone could fulfill. 

So, what’s your client’s intent with their campaign? Inspire brand love? Radicalize fandom? Change hearts? Move minds? Rock worlds? 

  “What’s your in-hand date,” is important, you’ll end up getting to that question eventually, but it doesn’t belong at the front of the conversation, it belongs at the end. 

“What’s your intent” positions you and what you sell, at the heart of brand ambition. A question like that impacts margin, sales, growth, and client loyalty. 

Q #3: What’s the ROE? 

Your buyer is investing in more than a product, they are buying something intangible. And we are trying to create something inspirational in concert with their end-goal, we want to not merely satisfy clients, but challenge them to aspire to all the cool things our medium can do for their brand.

What are they trying to achieve through what they are buying? And how can we amplify that through our expertise?  

We rarely speak about ROI, the return on investment, largely because the trackability of promo is a bigger endeavor. But there are other ROI’s: return on emotion, return on engagement, return on experience. 

When you build a kit that you’re shipping to homes, you’re building an experience. When you’re creating a shop or store to connect with an audience and build tribal unity around the brand, you’re creating engagement. When you’re gifting someone with a beautiful award for their hard-ass work on a year-long project, you’re creating an emotional experience. 

They are abstract words (emotion, engagement, experience) but they are very concrete outcomes. 

What’s the ROE?

Q #4: What’s the message? 

Not “what’s the imprint” but what message are we sending with this project? 

Design conveys meaning. Design is symbol-making. 

Logo drops have their place, but every product is a canvas, an opportunity to creatively communicate a specific message. Help your client out with a fill-in-the-blank: 

“What we want to say with this project is ________.” 

What’s that blank? 

Start with “what’s the message” then move to imprint. It’s bringing the world of design into the world of intention and purpose, carrying the conversation forward as opposed to limiting the conversation with factory imprint areas that might constrict (or prevent) what the client is trying to convey. 

How will we Design Forward? What’s our message? 

Q #5: How do we bring out the U?

This is both an internal question and a question to the client: How do we make this product/project both useful and unique? 

Can it be useful enough to be brought into homes? Will it be a preferred piece of apparel? Will it get used in their daily life and if so, how?  

You could use words like “sustainability” rather than usefulness but those words have lost their impact. With clients, we should always start with usefulness and uniqueness as the fulcrum to the larger conversation around sustainability. 

One more U: How do we create an AHHH! moment around the unboxing experience? When we kit, we should start with the end in mind. Think of every unboxing moment you’ve ever had with an apple product. Think with the end in mind, always. How do we make the design experience unique and contribute to that AHHH! moment? And what’s that moment, that unboxing moment look, feel, and sound like?

How do we bring out the U? 

Q #6: What’s the Sourcing Story? 

In my role as the chief content officer, I talk to customers all the time. Through interviews, emails, texts, I’m sometimes able to discern something happening in the market that is becoming a trend and I’m hearing (with surprising frequency) how more and more brands are wanting to know the sourcing story of the products they buy. Clients want transparency in the supply chain and even more, they want to know that what they are buying is contributing to the overall good of society. 

It’s just another example of what clients pay for versus what they are actually buying. They are paying for mugs but they’re buying emotion, engagement, messaging, affinity, inspiration … and now they’re wanting to exercise their purchasing power to invest in greater contributions to society. 

Sound lofty? It’s not. It’s practical and possible and what’s more, you can help bring that story to life by sourcing strategically. Again, questions are our answers here: Who is the factory? How are the workers treated? Is the product made in a responsible fashion? How does their work contribute to the communities around them? 

To be sure, there are plenty of clients who honestly either do not care to ask or who don’t know to ask, but you want to get ahead of the trend, you want to be the one to go to your clients first and connect the dots from sourcing to their brand by sharing a beautiful story about where their money goes. And suppliers need to bring these stories to light in a way that’s obvious and easy-to-transfer to clients. 

The sourcing story is becoming a vital part of the criteria for creative projects and we should budget not just for economies but for humanities. 

“You can’t just build based on what the client says”

Every work of art, every building constructed, every apparel collection starts with a rough draft, a blueprint, a storyboard, a sketch. It’s getting the framework down, building the bones. In agencies, this is called a creative brief. For writers, it’s an outline. But for everyone, it’s flint and fire: it sparks the mind and inflames the imagination, and gives your projects high-speed rails to run on. 

And it doesn’t have to be hard, remember, this is just an outline, a simple fill-in-the-blank, the skeletal structure that you’ll refine as you work along, but mostly, it’s at least something far more substantial than QTY, in-hand, and budget.

As leaders, we rarely pass on to our teams a methodology for opening an opportunity and making a sale. We’ve rarely sat down with a new team member and said, “here’s the framework we use with every client to move them from concept to curation to close.” 

And because we haven’t codified a simple procedure to share with our frontline sales team, they default to conversing with the client over factory specs. Which commoditizes our work and neither inspires nor engages the client in a meaningful way. 

For skeptics reading this: Even today, this very hour probably, you’re going to receive a request from a client and it’s going to sound like this, “we need to get some hoodies,” You -as the always responsive pro- will respond swiftly to get the client what they want, but the people who build the most creative campaigns in this business grow clients faster and retain clients longer because they know that there’s more to this ask than a simple product request. 

Clients pay for products but they buy something far more. Even the most famous architect in the world has clients coming to him, asking him to “build me a building,” but Frank Gehry said this about the client, “The client hires you, so the client is the priority. But you can’t just build a building based on what the clients say, because their vision is based on what’s normal.” 

Curating kick-ass projects for your client is about superseding normal.

And it’s really quite simple: asking questions.

The right ones.