Year : 2019

Player : Focal

Work : naming + positioning + competitor analysis + packaging

Shortly after visiting the World Press Expo in Montreal, Christina and I started discussing how rare good photography exhibits were in town. We also believed that the WPE had done a good job at talking about global issues but that didn’t resonate much with our local problems.

Focal is a photography exhibit focused on local societal issues. The name itself is a wordplay on Focus + Local. For our first exhibit a nice crowd of all ages showed up. Shortly after, we were selected as part of a startup cohort named Movement and coached by top sustainability executives at Dr. Pepper-Keurig, Loto Quebec and Cascades. These coaching sessions ended up with a pitch competition with 9 other startups of the cohort. Although we did not win, we learnt.

Focal was a non-profit project that wasn’t continued after the first exhibit. Focal’s values were about transparency (showing the truth through citizen’s lens), neutrality (the topics being very sensitive, a simple black and white branding was created) and giving back (we installed QR code in partnership with startup Simplyk to enable participants to either give time or money to non-profits working on solving the shown societal issues). Check out our video.