Client Corner: Morph Costumes

No matter how many morph suits you come across in public, the colourful characters are sure to raise a smile. The full-body all-in-ones have been a novelty part of night out culture for as long as we can remember but, for a trio of friends behind start-up Morph Costumes, the fun has just begun.

Born from a stag party, the company, which provides custom-designed suits via three sub brands run under the overarching Morph Costumes co, launched its first major marketing caign this week through creative agency Mr. President after causing an initial stir on Facebook.

Kicking off a series of articles profiling a new breed of innovators disrupting the modern marketing landscape, below, Morphsuits co-founder, Gregor Lawson (below), lets us in on his business strategy and future vision, aided by input from Mr. President creative partner Laura Jordan-Bambach.

Tell us more about how the idea for Morph Costumes was born?

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that a few drinks were involved. We were at a stag party and the fancy dress theme was that you had to dress head-to-toe in one colour.

One of our mates arrived in a blue Spandex suit he got from eBay. He couldn’t see much out of it and it didn’t fit particularly well, but he was a superhero celebrity that night. My friends, Ali and Fraser Smeaton, and I had worked on loads of different products and brands, from Gillette to Mars, to PlayStation, but we’d never seen a response like that.

When did the initial conversation about the business come? Was it on that actual night?

We (myself and my two business partners Ali and Fraser Smeaton) already had a business running, called Punditit, a sports discussion forum. The insight behind it was that guys love sport, but the older they get the less they get to play it. And the older they get the more opinionated they get about sport and argue with pundits etc. Our platform allowed them to take sports news articles and write their own story. Other users then had the option of voting stories, which pushed them up the page.

It was very labour intensive and there wasn’t going to be much reward until we hit a certain level of traffic. We had talked about selling a product instead and had just started to look for something that we thought people would like; we felt pretty confident that this was it.

What was the next step in putting the business plan into action? How many meetings etc. followed the initial idea?

First, we bought some of the suits to test them out for ourselves. We’d never had so much attention and we had another great night. That was when we decided to start Morph Costumes.

There were several steps to putting the plan into action:

a) Cash. We invested £1k each so we could test the concept

b) Product. We found a manufacturer through www.alibaba.com and started working on sles. We spent three months getting the material just right, so you could see through the product but no one could see you

c) Website. We made a website for $1,000. It’s embarrassing to look at it now from a design POV but it was a lean, mean selling machine

d) Facebook. The remainder of our cash went on stock so we had to get creative when it came to driving awareness. Facebook was very different in 2009 to how it is now. Back then it allowed us to engage with a global audience for whom social cred was everything. We focussed on creating amazing pictures and videos to build the brand and drive engagement (nowadays it would be called content!)

Tell us about receiving your first order and how did the customer find out about you?

It was a great day and the culmination of several months of late nights (for the first year of Morph Costumes we stayed in our normal jobs. Ali was at Barclays, Fraser, BT Broadband and I was at Procter & Gamble). Our first customer found us through Facebook.

Have you and your co-founders been known to wear morph suits yourselves and what’s your personal favourite?

Hell yeah! Pretty much every Morph image on our website is us. I’m 35 now but I still love fancy dress so it’s difficult not to be involved in testing new products and my friends pretty much expect it. I still ‘morph up’ every couple of weeks. Most recently I was on the BBC’s coverage of T in the Park, where me and a bunch of mates dressed up as T in the Ark… it was rainy.

My favourite is The Clown Morph suit. The detail of the design is amazing.

Tell us about how you partnered up with agency Mr. President?

We had started to sell non-Spandex costumes in addition to Morphsuits. We needed a big idea to glue together our marketing across three brands (Morphsuits, Morph Costume Co (non-Spandex) and Digital Dudz). A friend called Helen Lawrence suggested Mr. President would be a good fit. Helen was right, Mr. President won the pitch, and we’ve been working with them and loving every minute since.

Tell us about the shoot for the new caign film?

The shoot is up there with the best experiences of my career. It was one of those moments where everything clicked. We are delighted with the end result. Special mention to Reuben Dangoor, the director from Rogue Films. From square one he really understood the essence of Morph and got everyone bought into his vision.

How do the commissions for the designs work? Do you create them yourselves?

Innovation is at the core of what we do. We created all of the designs in the beginning but as we push to become more innovative we’ve started working with lots of other people, generally far more creative than us!

a) Mark Rober. Mark is now one our business partners, he is an ex-NASA scientist and has the amazing mix of cool, creative geek. He invented Digital Dudz and has applied his patented technology to a variety of other products

b) Kyle Langois. Kyle is an amazing Canadian spray paint artist. A couple of years ago Kyle took a white Morph suit, spray painted a zombie onto it and posted it on our website. It got 8,000 likes. We asked him to create more and struck a deal where he gets a royalty for every design of his that we sell. We now have five of his suits on sale around the world and many more in production. We’ve recently started working with some of the best costume designers in the world using a similar process

c) Social media. We’ve received thousands of ideas for Morph suit designs over the last five years. In 2011, we ran a competition for fans to design their own super hero; here are some of the entries. Splash Morph won.  We made him and gave the first Splash off the production line to the winner.

Your business was born from a personal social experience. What advice would you give potential entrepreneurs looking to start a business?

a) Test your concept before going all-in, if possible. It has never been easier to do this

b) Find a business partner to split the workload; someone who, ideally, has a similar outlook but very different skills to you

c) Don’t worry too much about budget in the early days, having a ‘less-with-more’ mind-set is often how you have your best ideas

What are your long term hopes for your Morph?

We want to continue to create the most impactful costumes in the world and make more films with Mr President.

Answers from Mr. President creative partner Laura Jordan-Bambach:

Tell us about the shoot for the Morph caign film…

The shoot was directed by Reuben Dangoor through Rogue Films – an incredible young talent whose work we already knew from his viral ‘music video’, Being a Dickhead’s Cool. He’s an incredible artist (an illustrator as well as animator and director) and has the right kind of punk attitude for a brand as brave as Morphsuits. It was a wonderful collaboration with him.

It was done over the course of a few days at locations around London, including the Mr. President offices, making sure we got the most action possible packed in. We were working with a brilliant cast of dancers, acrobats, friends – even the clients. And the costumes are so much fun that we were all eager to get in there and dance around in the party scene too.

Over the course of a week we produced long edits for both the UK and US markets (differing because of both cultural sensibilities and licencing differences), plus a range of stings focussed on different styles of product and costume occasions. Halloween is a big driver for Morph Costumes and we wanted to make sure we could make an impact in their two key markets in time for the scary season!

Why did the Morphsuits partnership appeal?

In Gregor’s case, there is an incredible opportunity to work together to propel the Morphsuits business from being a niche set of products to kicking off a revolution in the costume industry.

This challenge has the film at its heart, but we have also created the new brand visual identity and mnemonics, website and other work to support their ambitions. Plus the Morphsuits team is everything you’d want in a client – interested and interesting. And we all thoroughly love their products! Working with them is an absolute pleasure.

Check out the full range of designs at Morphsuits.