Can the master brander make one more change?
After more than five decades of making branded art, Billy Apple enters the world of FMCG.
FOR A BUSINESS venture, Billy Apple Cider’s time-to-market might be considered slow, even glacial. It is almost 53 years since the pop artist-formerly-known-as-Barrie-Bates created a new brand, Billy Apple, aka himself. And only now, in the year he turns 80, has his first commercial product hit supermarket shelves.
Launched on March 14, Billy Apple Cider got shelf space early on in the more elite retail spaces – Farro Fresh, Moore Wilson’s, Nosh, New World – and as Idealog went to press it had sold around 2000 cans in its first two weeks. The aim is to sell all 60,000 cans from the first production run by the end of the year.
The cider is being produced in Gisborne by leading British cider maker Bulmers, using New Zealand apples blended according to the Golden Ratio (also known as the Fibonacci formula) – a key ratio in Apple’s art.
Unusually for cider, it comes in a can. Apple says he looked first at bottles, but they were restrictive. The can format (with its association with one of pop art’s most enduring images, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) allowed Apple to start with a “blank white gallery wall” for his packaging, he says.
Leading the cider project is Saatchi & Saatchi’s worldwide director of design Derek Lockwood, who is branding and marketing Billy Apple Cider through his own company, with profits split.
He says the cider has the advantages of a strong back story, great design and a wellcrafted product.
“It will have a deeper story than most brands in the market.”
Is this an artist selling out? Definitely not, Lockwood says.
“The nature of Billy’s work has been around the transactional. As he says, in 1964 [with the pivotal pop art exhibition American Supermarket in New York] he took the supermarket into the art gallery. Now he’s taking the art gallery into the supermarket.”
A serious attempt to grow and market a Billy Apple apple in the early 2000s failed at the last hurdle, when the cultivar developed by HortResearch didn’t store well enough for the international market, Apple says. Cider is a logical next step.
Apple’s wife Mary Morrison says the cider is “art, not business” and is part of a much larger project around branding and intellectual property. It started with Apple changing his identity in 1962, and then, in 2007, trademarking himself and his art in eight categories, including fresh fruit, alcoholic beverages and apple pie.
“The registered trademark is an art project. It’s subject matter. Some people paint landscapes, Billy investigates IP. The question is, what is it to become a registered brand?”
One answer that would ring true with any Kiwi company trying to protect its brand is: expensive. New Zealand law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts has put almost $140,000 of time and money into trademarking Billy Apple.
Billy Apple Cider was launched to coincide with the opening of the artist’s retrospective show at the Auckland Art Gallery, Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else. But Lockwood says the cider isn’t a publicity gimmick – it’s a long-term project.
The cider’s distributor, Negociants, is an Australian company, with offshoots in the US and the UK, so why not take the product to Australia and then the world, Apple says.
“My dream would be to stick with it and go global. Become the best cider in the world.”