by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Places, Retail | Aug 5, 2025
The Nuance of the Hand-Wrought Being a handworker—a person that, over the last half century, has utilized my hands as a consistent pathway to the articulation of ideas, I tend to look for, and create in, the spirit of those things. You—being a creative person—know...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Interior Design, Places, Retail, Storytelling | Oct 25, 2024
Spherical Design Holism for Hospitality | A Manual for Brand Placemaking Integration for Experiential Strategies and Tactics The Deployment of *Experientiality Earlier in my career, I worked on a string of projects for Disney, working with the Disney Imagineers and...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Cool People, Luxury, Retail, Storytelling | Jun 27, 2024
Brands That Live in the Shadow, But Are Full of Light Do you have a brand relationship that is, to your thinking, your personal secret— something special, marvelous, your happily loved and savored place? Is there ever a brand that lives on the quiet side, unknown,...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Places, Retail, Storytelling | Jun 5, 2024
Conceptions of Brand-related built environments for storytelling in contextual community. First off, a reference to the Oakley Headquarters—an environment designed and dedicated to the spirit of innovation that drives the brand and the creation of their products;...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Retail | Apr 11, 2024
Designing brands for consumer profiles in only one geography. Most brand shops have experience in developing brands that are global in nature, they start in one area—likely the geographic origination of the brand creation, then they expand to other regions in the...
by Tim Girvin | Interior Design, Marketing 2.0, Places, Retail | Feb 22, 2024
Emotional strategies in sensate brand integration Brands ask, “touch me more often, be my friend, speak to me, stay in touch.” Talking to an executive brand team, I reach-out in a simple question—“what’s the point here—what’s this workshop really about?” And the...
by Tim Girvin | Brand Mysticism, Concepts, Places, Retail | Feb 8, 2024
I gave a talk at Procter & Gamble’s hall at Building One, downtown Cincinnati. This talk was about spherical thinking, brands and storytelling, a way of looking at the narrative of brands as narrative concatenations—knots and threads of woven tellings, that...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Cool People, Designers, Marketing 2.0, Retail | Nov 9, 2023
The Art of the Shopping Bag It was a reminder from friend Steve Heller, the Design Editor in Chief at Print Magazine, that recalled the legacy of former Bloomingdale’s Chief Creative Officer, John Jay— in the following notation from the Magazine: “Jay’s bags also...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Retail | Oct 4, 2023
GIRVIN’s 50 years old—speaking of finely-aged, so we have history, and it runs back to wines that we’ve produced ourselves, gifted wines and wine brands we’ve built for enterprises in the US, Asia and Canada. Wines are, as everyone knows, particularly challenging...
by Tim Girvin | Brand Mysticism, Concepts, Retail | Aug 3, 2023
The Patterning of a Place, Storytelling Symbols in Space Culturally, any explorer of the world’s architecture will sense and see symbolic dimensions expressed in how places are designed—a cathedral would be an obvious journey-making in symbolic expressions. It might...
