My Kid Couldn’t Draw That

Written by Murray Crane

When I first began to believe I could build Crane Brothers, I had significantly more ideas than working capital. There was no budget for an agency, so I designed the first logo myself, set in DIN Schrift. I have always had a weakness for German design: first a typeface, then a car, now a wife. The logo looked like something anyone could have done. It wasn’t. It was all in the kerning.

That was the first gap I filled with an idea instead of money. There were many more. Some stuck. Many didn’t. The ones that lasted usually came from somebody else.

Clothes may seem simple. The processes behind them are not. Our team and network of makers have taken hundreds of thousands of measurements and sewn hundreds of thousands of stitches, most of which no customer will ever see. It is detailed, pedantic work. Good designers share that temperament. They care about the kerning no one notices and the margin no one measures. That is why design has never been regarded as an afterthought here.

We value restraint and trust. In 27 years the logo has had only three iterations, and only one of them significant. We would rather refine than reinvent, in our identity as much as in a lapel. Some of our collaborations are as old as the business itself, and still begin with nothing more than a reference and a conversation. That degree of brevity takes years to earn, and we don’t take it for granted.

And we believe good design belongs everywhere: in the type, the pictures, the spaces and the website, right down to the colour of the ink in our pens. Over 27 years we have built an alumni network of graphic designers, type designers, photographers, stylists, architects and developers, each of whom has left a mark on Crane Brothers. Some are no longer with us. Their thinking is still in the bones of this business.

This week, for the third time, our website has been recognised at the Best Design Awards. It is a welcome nod, but the point is the habit that produced it, the one we started in 1999 when the ideas outnumbered the money.

New Zealand’s design community is small, talented and generous. It is also underused. Too many businesses treat design as decoration added at the end, or something to be done cheaply. Our experience has been the opposite. Bring designers in early, give them a real problem, pay them properly, then get out of the way. Do it for long enough and it stops being a service you buy. It becomes your culture.

I don’t believe you can start a brand. You can only build something, and hope that in time it becomes bigger than the idea it began as.

I designed the first logo. Thankfully, I stopped there.