You hear a lot of chat about FMCG and how packaging is designed to attract the attention of the purchaser, impulse buying, trading up, all that sort of thing. But you could coin the term SMCG – that’s Slow-Moving Consumer Goods to describe Trash & Soul. Not that many people walk into a shop and buy a luxury product within ten seconds. Some take ten minutes, some go and come back day after day. With Trash & Soul you have to persuade someone to wear bottle-top earrings or a ring-pull bracelet. Saffron’s challenge was to turn the intuition of an artist, creative director Pablo Reinoso, into a luxury brand. It’s all about bringing life to a spent object and elevating the everyday. The brand both decries and celebrates our disposable society.
Trash and Soul, a brand of LVMH, is for people who like luxury brands but don’t take consumerism or themselves too seriously. The brand’s heritage is based on the more serious artistic tradition of using everyday objects in new and provocative ways – as found in the work of Claes Oldenberg, for example. The result is a new type of luxury brand but it isn’t FMCG.
