SCABs

Bottom Drawer SCAB – By @Joebee731

By Joe Colquhoun

 

Bottom Drawer SCAB

 

Throughout the year we’ve been reminded to keep ideas, the ones that don’t work out, in our metaphorical ‘bottom drawer’. Somewhere, hidden amongst scratch disks and another fake png, deep within the depths of your hard-drive, there’s a brilliant idea waiting to re-surface.

 

Mads and I recently had a clear out of all this stuff. It took a while but pretty much every thought we’ve had is now either filed neatly away within our SCA folder, on our shared google docs or noted down on one of our phones. 

 

The feeling of actually going through every loose file and tab on your desktop and binning most of them is an experience I can’t quite explain in words. It’s become my form of therapy every Friday evening.

 

Weirdly enough, however, our uncharacteristically organised work folder has paid off, or at least I hope it does. Purely by chance, I happened to stumble upon an AMA on Reddit by a man who’s a professional in the field of Hemp manufacturing. Oioi.

 

Sending him a quick email of Alex and I’s D&AD video, I really just wanted validation that our idea was possible. As you can imagine I’m still a tiny bit sour about not getting a pencil, plus there was always that feeling that we didn’t win because our idea just wasn’t realistic.

 

Anyways, fast forward three days and by golly gosh he’d only gone and replied. To summarise the following emails would take a while so I’ll give you just this.

 

“The short answer to your question is an emphatic YES”

 

It was possible! Our product really could exist in real life, albeit a little more expensive than we’d anticipated but let’s not get too bogged down in the detail.

 

What followed was a couple more emails and a surreal three-way phone conversation between myself, wearing only boxers (it was hot okay). Alex B who’d bolted 100 meters out of earshot from the pub and a man named Michael, in what I imagine to be a tall office block somewhere in LA.

 

Within five minutes of our conversation, it was clear this guy knew a lot more about the industry than Alex and I, his excitement and optimism in general really re-energised the feeling we once felt about it around D&AD time.

 

However, with ideas like this, it doesn’t take much effort to show an interest as we’ve found out in the past. It takes a lot more effort to actually start taking it seriously and spending real time and possibly money on the development of the product.

 

What’s the moral of this story then? I’m not really sure, honestly I got a bit lost myself. If I was to hazard a guess though, I’d say it’s about making sure you have your work to hand. 

 

It’s easy to give up on an idea that hits a dead end, but having everything neatly folded away for the future meant I could send work over in 5 minutes, to a Reddit user I’d stumbled upon at the dead of night.

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