Studio Spotlight: PaulWylde

In the second of our studio spotlights, I take an afternoon to sit down with Paul Wylde, one of the industry’s leading design veterans who has worked across a range of exciting and varied projects. So Paul, firstly, can you tell us a little bit about your background?

I love telling stories on behalf of organisations that require brand identities, products, experiences, environments and service to express their ideas and personality. In a previous life, I’m pretty sure I was a movie director. There are so many parallels between an airline and a theatrical experience – a scripted performance, on a specially created stage, using costumes and props delivering an experience with consistency, flair and charm, making the audience feel that it’s all for them. There’s a thrill for me when the ‘performance’ of an airline comes together successfully, seeing products, ideas and service routines orchestrated and centred around the guest.

I initially trained as a Product Designer at Ravensbourne College of Design before completing what was then, the only strategic multi-disciplinary master’s degree in design in Europe at that time, at The Glasgow School of Art. I was fortunate enough to be awarded first prize twice by the Royal Society of Arts Design Awards — winning the very same accolade as Jonny Ive did, who went on to lead Apple’s design team.

Truth be known, I had little interest or enthusiasm for airplanes, so, I think it’s fair to say that designing for aviation probably found me. Flying Business or First Class where ideas and dreams that seemed so far away for me, being raised from the top floor of a 1960s council high-rise block of flats in the London borough of Tower Hamlets.

I enjoyed a brief stint in advertising as an art director prior to landing the prestigious role at British Airways of “Design Manager” before morphing the role into a more accurately characterised “Brand Guardian”. There, I enjoyed an incredible tenure from 1995 through 2002.

During my time there I repositioned Masterbrand placing service and Britishness at its heart and helped bring the first lie-flat beds to Business Class. I also worked on the last ever Concorde refit, a complete refresh of the Club Europe brand and cabin, even the first low-cost, high value carrier – Go. All of this, by the ripe old age of 36.

I also take a lot of pride in having a personal involvement in introducing some incredible new design agencies to the skies including Factory Design, Tangerine and Conran & Partners. Along with my team, these agencies are now leading voices within the industry. I loved working alongside my dear friends and now industry legends Michael Crump, Neal Stone, Jill Macdonald and Derek Dear.

All the while, competing with my peers and respected design leaders including Joe Ferry and Paul Edwards at Virgin Atlantic. It was an unprecedented time of industry growth, opportunity and innovation that influenced many sectors far beyond aviation. A time of growth that in my opinion, may never be surpassed.

It’s true that the aviation industry often turns to London when it comes to airline interiors, why is that?

The London design community that incubated and grew around BA and Virgin’s respected visions literally laid the foundations for what became the modern vernacular of airline interior design and customer service. I’m both very proud and very humbled to have had such a meaningful voice during that extraordinary period of creative and commercial success that placed design at the heart of commercial strategy.

I jumped ship to agency side and represented the mighty Interbrand and Imagination as Senior Consultant and Creative Director respectively before moving to America in 2001 for a dream come true invitation to lead creative strategy for BMW Designworks in Los Angeles reporting to Adrian Von Hoydonk and Chris Bangle.

Throughout these magical experiences, I had a foot firmly anchored in aviation through my leadership of the Airbus, oneWorld and Embraer accounts, in addition to refreshing and most welcomed programs for Rolls Royce, BMW, Microsoft, Virgin Media, Ford and Boeing.

So how did your own agency come about?

I founded paulwylde in 2011 from a small room overlooking the Pacific Ocean on an island just outside of Seattle with a Rhodesian Ridgeback at my feet and a belief that there is a market for a specialised consultancy that creates design solutions for airlines that places the interpretation and translation of brand strategy into experiences at the heart of all activity.

Within two years of launching, Jet Blue, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Hilton Worldwide and Air Canada were all active clients. 12 years on, we’ve had the good fortune to quadruple our client base and incredibly, all without the need for any concerted promotion, marketing or advertising — the opportunities flowed steadily towards us from our reputation of thinking in the clouds with our feet on the ground.

What has been fascinating to observe during the past 12 years is the passion from airlines to behave more like hotels, and, for hotels wanting to behave like airlines. This is the case from a positioning, strategic, branding, environmental, loyalty, product, service and operational standpoint.

This reality has placed us well to add tremendous value to both, all across the customer experience by aligning and uniting service, product, experience and space around meaningful brand ideas and user experiences that stand out and stay there.

A few years after founding paulwylde, I finally captured our sentiment with our guiding mantra that has stuck for us and is easily understood by our clients, partners and collaborators – “We create beautiful brands that move people”. And that sentiment of course, is applied literally and emotionally.

To this day, and very much inspired by my early years as a creative soul, I’m still fascinated by three areas of particular interest and exploration:-

The concept of beauty: What is beauty? How do we know when we experience it? How is beauty defined, measured, quantified, valued, inspired and conserved? Is beauty and its assessment transient? Does it change over time, scale, geography, culture and application? Does beauty serve to explain the best of the human condition?	Small spaces, big impact: Growing up in a modernist-inspired attempt at a post-war affordable social housing solution
Home: When does a space transcend its intended functionality and adopt an emotional, cultural and spiritual entity to become a home? What does being at home feel like? How do we know when this moment happens? Does this change over time and as personal circumstances change?	Creating movements: Why are some concepts, ideas, propositions, brands and products accepted, embraced, admired, believed in and lived by, and others not? The fundamentals of branding if you like. I have always been fascinated by how media effects storytelling, narrative, acceptance and engagement.

What brands had you worked with in the past?

I had to take a quick peek at our website to remind myself of our incredible clients and I’m still in awe of their prestige and humbled by their trust and support. They include: Solaseed Air (Founding client), Jet Blue, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Air Canada, Air Canada Rouge – a brand that we created from scratch inclusive of naming, Hawaiian Airlines. Alaska Airlines, Belavia, Saudia, The Boeing Company, Delta Air Lines, Zodiac Aerospace, Panasonic Aviation Corporation, Allegiant Air, JSX, Copa Airlines, Honda Jet, Ultrafabrics, Aerofoam Industries, Tapis, BeOnd, Bermudair and Amtrak.

I also enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame fronting a design show on American TV called California by Design. That brought an appreciation for the pressure of low-budget, fast-production reality documentary making and the commercial aspects of making TV-based content.

What brands have you worked with most recently?

The big stories for us over the past three years are Bermudair, Amtrak and BeOnd. All notable and meaningful examples of innovation for different reasons and all very different cultures. Bermudiar being the first national carrier for the island and requiring sensitive cultural expression within the context of a premium, boutique proposition. BeOnd was a dream come true.

A visionary client who gave us free reign to create an airline unlike anything you’ve seen before. Amtrak, recognising that what made it successful in the past may not necessarily do so in the future and having the courage to look outside of the sector for brand, design and service inspiration.

Can you tell us more about BeOnd? What did you work on, what was the process?

BeOnd was a 14-month, high octane ride to dream up an airline that’s like no other. And, a true partnership. Our visionary clients Max Nilov, Tero Taskila and Sascha Feurherd gave us a free reign to create the world’s first premium leisure airline from a blank sheet of paper – much like what we did for Air Canada seven years prior, albeit for a very different market sector.

Our tasks included creating, defining and articulating the brand’s purpose, vision, mission and values. It included naming. Brand identity design. Cabin interior design. Articulating the entire guest journey inclusive of unique, own-able and meaningful touch-points. Ground experience design strategy and comprehensive brand, design and communication guidelines for local teams to interpret thereafter. Coming out of the horror of Covid-19, it was a gift of a program and we are very proud of our contributions.

We were given a platform to succeed by the BeOnd team. A wide scope for creative exploration and swift, intelligent and definitive decision-making from the airline’s leadership team. I used to maintain back at BA that an agency is only as effective as its clients, the interesting work that resulted in our collaboration with BeOnd is a testament to this hypothesis that I conceived over 20 years ago.

During the program, distance seemed dead and time irrelevant. Weekly concept design reviews that went on for hours but felt like minutes kept the BeOnd team working well into the very early hours of the morning locally in Frankfurt and Dubai.

We were also so lucky to have been partnered with some of the best manufacturers in the industry – the team at Optimares and Clip did an exemplary job in translating our brand vision into design realisation under that watchful eye of my right-hand men Vu Chu and Henry Hiltner that have been by my side for the past 12 years and whom I owe so much to.

Vu is a quiet, modest genius and is the most thoughtful, sensitive and accomplished designer that I have ever known. Henry is the master of making sense of my creative direction and adding a layer of magic, technical rigour and crucially, realism that frees me up to dream on behalf of my clients. When I view my website, I can see us three perfectly unified through our 12 years of endeavours — fostering great pride within me.

What is your approach to design? How do you differ from other agencies?

My clients would be the best judge of that. I can tell you that they all remark upon the way that we contextualise the value of design within their organisations – and the tools to make design thrive – in a way that is unique.

When we tackle any solution, we always go above and beyond the immediate brief and understand how our potential contributions will inspire and activate crew:

• How we can help airlines (and hotels) create positive opportunities to connect more with customers?
• What is the correct visual and tactile expression of an airline’s brand positioning through form, material, colour, finish, texture, sound and on occasions, aroma?
• How can design differentiate through all senses?
• How can design provide the illusion of space?
• How can design reduce irrelevant visual information and prioritise what’s important to that customer at the time?
• How can design reduce weight and part-count?
• How can design offer multi-functionality during a long flight?
• How can design offer retrofitability, ease of installation and maintenance?
• How can design inspire and unite an organisation around its founding brand principles and service style? How can design allow a product to be reused, repurposed and recycled?

These and many more are questions that are regularly scrutinised during the early stages of a program.

What do you see the biggest challenges for airlines today and how can your studio help them?

As I reflect, I see two main challenges, thus opportunities for my creative gifts to be applied that have prevailed during of the past 25 years of my airline design career. Firstly, encouraging clients to have a meaningful point of difference that provides brand differential and competitive advantage. And secondly, helping clients find the will, courage, energy, creativity and commercial case to commit.

How do you see design evolving for brands over the years to come?

I can see the activity of design increasingly focusing on self-actualisation and taking more responsibility to remind people of the beauty that’s already in the world as opposed to its traditional mantra of automatically and continually creating the new.

Deploying strategies of reductionism, dematerialization, resilience, re-purposability, driven by changing attitudes of consumers towards sustainability, experiences over possessions, prioritization of attention, driven by the quest for meaning and truth, responsibility to future generations and calling our brands to live by their values and prove their worth everywhere around me.

The interesting fact, and an observation that I offered when I opened the Expo 2022 conference as keynote speaker was that designing for aviation has always been a science of salience. Less is more. Each and every product solution must buy its way onboard through functional merit.

What are your dream projects to work on? 

To be quite honest Jonny, simply carrying on in this vein for a few more years. I developed an idea at the start of my airline career that has stayed with me and for those who have worked with me know very well. Because for most of us in The West, travel has become accessible and ubiquitous, the novelty of destination has slowly declined and the experience of the journey has become a deciding factor in arranging travel plans.

Thus, “travel is less about a journey from A to B and more of a journey of Me”. How will this experience provide positive memories? Chances to be charmed, surprised, enlightened, enriched, fulfilled, educated, inspired and moved.

The other dream projects I have are quite personal: To build the optimal tiny house with a view in Big Sur California, using all I that know about making small, beautiful spaces work and leave the environment in a better place than they were found. I’m also working up an idea for a “listening lounge” here in my local town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. A place to drop by, sip a perfect cocktail by the ocean and listen to amazing music on an incredible sound system in an relaxed, elegant, understated and beautiful environment.

Sounds like the perfect place to keep the creative juices flowing. Thank you Paul, we look forward to seeing more of your projects over the coming months! To learn more about PaulWylde, visit www.paulwylde.com