"I'm building the worlds best electric scooter. Will you create the branding and launch campaign?"

Carson and I had previously lived together in a shared apartment in Oval, South London. Carson worked on Uniwheel, and I was an Art Director in adland. During the few years we lived together, we would talk extensively about design and entrepreneurship. He was even the third guest on my old podcast, which we recorded in our living room.

Before starting TAUR, Carson, myself and now TAUR's head of marketing, Edward Turner, had met several times about starting a company together. I had an idea to create a low-cost, easy assembly bed frame for city dwellers and students on a budget after sleeping on bread crates and liking the experience. We created a prototype for 'Bed Box', but the project fizzled out. The partnership, however, persisted.

When Carson said he was starting TAUR, the quality of the product was never in question, I'd worked with him enough to know that he was an exceptional engineer with a consumer mindset, all I had to do was make the brand look 'cool as fuck’ (technical term), and he gave me complete autonomy to do so.

The space was full of hobbyists, and it reminded me of the early computer industry. Every other product was either bright red, lime green or black, so I pushed for white because I recalled my excitement when the first iPod was released, listening to Kanye Wests' College Dropout in the summer sun on a crisp white, super cool, futuristic device. I wanted to recapture that magical feeling. When making any aesthetic decision, I kept falling back to the idea that the beauty of this product would be in intangible qualities.

Over those few months, I refined their logo, worked on finding a perfect paint finish and colour, and scrutinized every detail regarding the branding size and position. We knew that if someone looked at the product, they would need to identify what it was. But we also didn't want the branding to be obnoxious. It's hard to quantify 'coolness', but I knew that if we accomplished it, a mass appeal would follow. Not only had Carson implemented some key product innovations, but the TAUR brand transitioned the electric scooter industry from the realm of nerds obsessing over specs into popular culture.

For the launch of the product, we created a Kickstarter campaign. We had initially wanted to do something slick, but Kickstarter advised that projects that looked too polished tended not to resonate with their audience. Instead, we created an internet-friendly, three-minute video that used humour and quick cuts to convey our product benefits.

Alongside our creative team and James, the director, I spent several weeks refining the script to ensure we told the story of TAUR in a compelling and punchy way. The campaign was a great success, and we secured over $300,000 worth of pre-sales which TAUR throttled to not over-commit on their first batch of product.

With the pressure on and COVID creating worldwide shortages of parts, the following months proved to be an uphill battle for TAUR, causing large delays. Many of their competitors went out of business, and the price of batteries kept increasing due to demand from the EV industry.

During this time, I kept myself busy by working on TAUR's app, eCommerce site and virtual video showroom, which, interestingly, was inspired by an early 2000s KFC campaign called the Subservient Chicken, where users could input actions into a search bar, and a man dressed in a chicken suit would perform them.

With all TAURs touchpoints lined up and ready to go. My final act was to help them create a commercial for their limited launch in LA in November of 2022. I came up with a simple idea where we would show TAUR traversing the streets of LA, and capture the reactions of people seeing TAUR for the first time. The idea was to maintain our desire to sell through subtlety and encapsulate that feeling you get when you see something incredible for the first time.

In the proceeding weeks of pre-production, we began to work with Hispanic-American director Alfredo Vidal and his exceptional team. During this phase, I began to feel that the essence of the initial idea was lost. I was using references like the Guinness Surfer and ultra slow-mo F1 commercials as a reference and I wanted to shoot in high contrast black and white. But given we had selected Alfredo, I also had to respect his directing decisions and not step on his creative vision.

We filmed in Los Angeles on the day of the shooting, and the team and the production staff were next-level. It was super hot that day, but I spent most of my time in an air-conditioned car with an external monitor voicing feedback via a radio feed.

After production, we spent several weeks refining the video in post-production, and the most significant challenge was finding ways to capture the product moving at speed. We had used one of the best segway camera operators in LA, but the footage just didn't do justice to the smoothness and speed with which TAUR can travel.

The stroke of genius that saved the film came from Carson finding the track "Subtle Thing" by Marian Hill. Not only was it a cool track, but it gave additional credence to the lack of decent product shots because, as the music reinforced, it's a 'subtle thing'.

This also aligned perfectly with the initial mission not to be a garish, ugly bombastic and badly made scooter of the past. But to quietly announce that TAUR had arrived and, in doing so, lifted the bar for the rest of the industry. Mission accomplished.