The Ashes of Creation

Some of you will have seen my recent post announcing the split of Fable into two new companies.

At first glance this may strike you as madness and taken at face value, you'd probably be right. Fable is - soon to be was - close to my heart. Whilst Sean and I didn't start the company, we actually inherited it, I loved the name and we really made it our own. It was silly, fun, honest and didn't take anything too seriously apart from our work. Once we set up cameras and got them rolling it was brass tacks. When Premiere fired up we'd spin our caps the wrong way round and get stuck in. When After Effects roared into life it was go time, and so on. That being said, we embraced the madness and were delightfully daft with it.

Over time and without us really noticing, Fable started to become less coherent as a brand; slower, heavier, lumpen.

It had a special appeal. We didn't want to work with stiff organisations or anyone too serious, we wanted the people we could have fun with - and by Christ, we got them. Fable had a charm all of it's own that attracted the specific type of people we wanted to work with.

As the saying goes, a rolling stone gathers no moss but equally a snowball tends to get bigger the more it's in motion. As business owners we should always be looking to the horizon, but it pays to look inwards as well. The key to our success was always our sheer agility of being a smaller company, but as time went on we absorbed more and added more services to the list. Over time and without us really noticing, Fable started to become less coherent as a brand; slower, heavier, lumpen.

The message was still there, but for some of the demos we wanted to target, both the brand personality and the message was either too off-kilter or just a bit confusing. This naturally led to us losing out on business in certain sectors as a result. Equally, we could scream until we were blue in the face that we were a visual studio, but try telling Google that when it wants to understand your audiences - this led to having to create a lot of different campaigns with different messages and artwork, but that would ultimately lead back to our website which was jam packed with tons of services. It was then and is still a problem. We wanted to diversify, but we were just tripping over our services and conflicting messaging - worse still, so were our clients.

The old self fulfilling prophecy.

Something needed to happen and we threw around a lot of ideas. From straight up streamlining and focusing entirely on core verticals to creating a comprehensive Fable group. All of these options had major flaws.

Over time it became clear to us that the best course of action would be to break from Fable as a brand and establish new, separate brands that catered to services that focus on very different things. There was a very obvious dividing line too; our 3D offering has always been problematic - tonaly we couldn't line up the messaging required to target our demographics in this area because of what Fable as brand was and represented. As a result, this led to less time and budget being spent to advertise those services. The old self fulfilling prophecy. Therefore it made it easy to shunt all of the 3D into a company of it's own, this allows for significantly more accurate and easier targeting as well as allowing us to provide a different tone that suits the demographic.

So why ditch Fable as a brand altogether if just shifting services around a bit? As heartbreaking as it is for me to walk away from the Fable brand, which I always felt a close relationship to, our gut feeling was that it wasn't direct enough and in fact, the premise of storytelling around the campfire was always a bit tenuous at best. As a result we felt that a clean break with something more on the nose, a bit of a play on words was better.

Thus, the majority of Fable will become 28 Takes Later and will still service a broad range of demographics, the marketing and personality will be much the same. 3D services will be handled exclusively by Petrichor Green and will sell into architects, property devs and retailers. PG will have a much more grown up vibe about it compared to 28TL to allow us to align with the relevant demographics.

As hard as it is to walk away from Fable as a brand, I feel it's the right course of action to help take us forward in a more sensible and manageable manner that, if i'm right, will help bring to bear and monetise all of our skillset, not just one half of it.

We will, I suppose, just have to wait and see.