“Having just a vision’s no solution / Everything depends on execution…”
Ethan Allen creative director Kemper Johnson knows a few things about bringing a vision to life. One of the minds behind the fun, fashion-forward Bull’s-Eye World campaign that reenergized Target, Kemper was also responsible for launching Sean John’s fragrance line at Estee Lauder, rebranding Coach, and revitalizing brands like Cole Haan, Express, and Kohl’s, to name a few.
Since September, he’s been crafting a vision for the future of Ethan Allen…and he didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “Immediately after I started here in September, the company was preparing for a huge conference of our retailers and designers. We had to think, What are we going to focus on? What matters today? What will matter tomorrow? There are the Ethan Allen pillars, you know: the craftsmanship and the quality, the variety of styles, the level of service, the personalization, the environmental sustainability – the details that make Ethan Allen Ethan Allen. The details are what matters. Every detail matters.” And so a tagline was born.
Chief marketing officer Bridget O’Brien walks by as Kemper shares his story and leans into the recorder. “It’s more than a tagline, even. It’s not a message, it’s the DNA of our brand. We’ve always been innovators – we changed the way furniture was sold in stores. We’ve always cared about craftsmanship and quality. We’re going to keep the tradition of making beautiful things and making them well – and we’re evolving, expanding, making room to delight an even larger audience.”
Once every detail matters came into focus, things really got rolling. “I’m a big Stephen Sondheim fan, and there’s a song that I’ve carried with me for years, just looking for the place it belonged,” Kemper confides. The song, “Putting it Together,” from Sunday in the Park with George, couldn’t have been a more perfect fit.
“It all started to come together in my mind: putting it together, bit by bit, piece by piece – the lyrics from the song, which is about the art of making art and seeing your vision come true. From there we got to the idea of The Art of Making Home, which is also all about the details, all about letting your personality shine.”
After getting the go-ahead for a major national TV commercial, Kemper turned to Joe Wright of Sibling Rivalry, who Kemper describes as “one of the A+ directors in the industry. He does, oddly enough, a lot of car commercials. He’s brilliant at bringing life to inanimate objects. So I presented the concept to him – I had boarded it in a way that it was basically about details.” [Boarding = storyboarding, a way to visually present a concept for video production.]
Joe had thoughts on it almost immediately. “I always get excited when someone comes to you with a brief and you … can create something with it that no one would have expected,” he shared. “For me, it just felt like a very exciting project to get involved in, because I knew I could do something really interesting with it.”
See what else Joe had to say about the vision and the execution of our gorgeous collaboration in this behind-the-scenes chat!
