Chasing Bondi
Issue 8: What happens when a destination becomes a brand?
[INT. – A SUNNY BEDROOM. DAY]
An alarm sounds gently.
You stir between your rust-toned hinoki-scented Bondi Linen flax sheets. They are rumpled, artfully so. A pampa bush sways gently in the middle distance.
You make your way to the bathroom. On the counter: a symphony of minimalist bottles sporting girthy, san serif fonts. The labels read like a botanical guide to pre-colonial Australia: lemon myrtle, tea tree, Tasmanian black pepper. A spray of eucalyptus hangs expressively in the shower. Inside, you wash your hair with Bondi Boost Anti-thinning shampoo and conditioner. Towelling yourself off with your Sunkissed Bondi Turkish towel, you pat a little of your Bondi Skin Co. green tea cooling eye gel into your orbital zone before realising that it’s tooth whitening day! After a quick brush with your Bondi Wash bamboo toothbrush, it’s time to pop in your Bondi Smile peroxide-free gel-filled trays. You finish with a smear of Bondi Sands SPF 50, and it’s time to get dressed. Something that says: I’m working out, but nonplussed about it. Earth-tone exclusive, but of course. You settle on a Bondi Born linen shirt with Bondi Active running shorts.
Making your way into the kitchen in your Hoka Bondi running shoes, you give your lemongrass scented labradoodle a quick pat and get to work clearing things up. What a mess! What a party. You light a Bondi Breeze scented candle to clear the air. Bergamot billows through the art deco living space. Clearing away crumpled cans of Bondi Brewing Co. Beer, and a few quarter-full Bondi Spritzes, you gather a few dozen glasses and empty the last drops of Bondi Liquor Co. gin down the sink, fishing soggy wedges of lime from the bottom, before spritzing everything down with your Bondi Wash Bench spray.
With that clean, it’s time to redress the internal balance: an immune-boosting Bondi Blend smoothie with a scoop of Bondi Protein Co., and a dollop of Bondi Coconut Yogurt for good measure. You wash your Bondi Morning multivitamin down with a swig of your Bondi Circus Oat Milk Latte, chasing it with a Bondi Beach Tea Co. slimming tea to up the fluids and a Bondi lean-green superfood coffee to hammer the point home. You’re hungry! But there’s no time to eat. Your Bondi Meal Prep brekky wrap will have to wait until after pilates.
What did you do last night? Why do all your products say Co. on the end? Are they all actually from Bondi? Who knows. Who cares? It doesn’t matter anyway.
Bondi Beach in its geographical sense has become so severed from what Bondi represents that the above could be anywhere in the world. What was once a one kilometre stretch of sand is now a lifestyle connotation, an idea, symbol. A celebrity in its own right. And in this age of partnerships and endorsements, it made us think: if not a living celebrity, what else could you attach a brand to in order to set context, align branding, and connote a certain lifestyle?
The most overused example we can think of is Bondi.
1. Act
The big conversation-starting ideas, strategies and executions that give businesses something to talk about. It’s about walking the talk to lay the foundations of a powerful message.
Want to sell your product at a 30% markup on the competition but simply can’t elevate an all-purpose cleaner? Designing a product for the upper-middle class yoga mum or Brazilian drum circle enthusiast but unsure about how to differentiate your yoghurt from the others? Should your male beauty brand allude to a salty, chiselled ruggedness? Should your ready-made-meal packaging to sing the nutritional virtues of its contents in just five little letters? Bondi.
In the past decade there’s been an undeniable uptick in brands using the word. Some make sense, geographically: local brands hailing from or near the suburb itself. Bondi Yoghurt, for example, started at the farmer’s market. But there’s a slew of ones not seemingly attached to the place at all.
They fall into the categories of health and wellness, upscale household products, beauty, leisurewear, athleisure wear, swimwear, alcohol, fancy food. If the Hamptons are coastal grandma, Bondi skews coastal youth. If Byron Bay points to hippie-luxe, Bondi leans beach-luxe: shinier, slicker, more cosmopolitan. It’s a far cry from its salty, working class origins, a shift that’s been satirised since at least 2012 by the Bondi Hipsters. There are no “budget” brands with the word Bondi in them, nor is there anything mundane. Don’t go looking for Bondi & Co. bin liners, at least not run-of-the-mill plastic ones. These are all products that are a bit superfluous, aspirational, fun: extra green stuff to boost your smoothie, naturally scented spray for your yoga mat, alcoholic drinks in graphic packaging, collagen peptides, raw bowls.
They’re lifestyle products dialled up a bit. Stuff for people with disposable income. Not only do – most of the time – Bondi products cost more, they also promise to do more: shinier hair, whiter teeth, glow-ier skin, a better body, a more nutritionally-amplified start to the day, an environmentally upgraded home. NYC’s Bondi Sushi offers a $95 luxe box to go. London’s Bondi Coffee offers the promise to “drink yourself healthy”. It’s the promise of a sunnier, sun-kissed life. You’re buying optimisation, or at least the idea of it.
Act is about walking the walk: putting your money where your mouth is and pricing what you’re saying is legit. But sometimes you need to nail a message or build an association that simply exists outside of the realms of physical possibility for your brand. That’s where a strategic partnership can fill the gaps. Involving a partner can often be the most organic way to help your product do more, reach new audiences or move in a new direction. But it comes with a cost: a partner, unlike, say, an advocate or endorser, is now tied to your brand. In the same way you sell equity in your business to an investor, you trade brand equity – sell your soul if you will – for access to whatever the partner is offering.
That means a partner’s rise or fall can directly impact your own brand in a bigger way than an endorsement ever could, which is why the decision to include Bondi in a product name really is entering a partnership with – of all bloody things – a beach.
But when you’re partnering with the world’s most famous beach, your stakeholder is the public’s collective consciousness. You’re forever tied to a perception, and the thing with perceptions? They can change. Quickly. Think about how 2020 went for the name Karen. Or 2005 for Cronulla. Even if it’s not so dramatic a shift, what happens when Bondi brands become so ubiquitous and indistinguishable from one another that a few snarky-yet-culturally-relevant art directors launch a newsletter dedicated to chronicling the sheer cringe factor of it all?
Like a stock, you’re tied to Bondi’s ups and downs. We wrote about how partnerships can get dicey back in 2022 when Dior partnered with Travis Scott. Bondi might be a real place, but the idea of Bondi is an entirely intangible entity. And places, unlike people, cannot be reasoned with.
Partnerships are a big risk that, yes, can have big rewards. But it can also be a big mess to pull yourself out of if things suddenly go south. Moral of the story? You need to vet whether the risks outweigh those rewards. If your product is named after the place it was founded, that seems like a pretty authentic partnership to us. If you’re slapping the name Bondi on to connote a lifestyle, do so with caution. Cronulla was once a bit of a vibe too.
2. Explain
The way those big ideas are distilled into words that resonate, build brand identity and nail the message.
The reason a partnership with Bondi works is it offers a way to tap into decades of brand awareness for a big stretch of sand, fast. But the benefit of that can’t just be a boost the product’s SEO, there’s too many Bondi products on the market for that. Slipping Bondi onto the name is a quick and dirty way to build context, and context sells.
Even if you’re not in an explicit partnership, the words you affix to your product and the context they provide are a crucial tenent to consider in explaining your brand. It’s the context that unlocks the sort of perception that allows a beer to charge 50% more than its competitors because it has a five-letter word starting with B and ending in ondi on the label.
But a partnership is the most overt way to create context and it limits your flexibility. Playing with context and being able to pivot at the right time can be a gamechanger. Not sure what we mean? Consider this essay in Forbes from Lucio Ribeiro, pointing out how the Apple Vision Pro rebranded the now ick-inducing metaverse to “spacial computing”. And trust us, we’re more than aware that there’s nothing particularly sexy about the term “spacial computing”, but it managed to nerf the immediate urge to groan when being presented with another product tackling the Metaverse head on. It gave consumers time to actually consider the product itself before they tuned out. If they opted for Apple MetaVision, the horse wouldn’t have made it out of the gates.
Here’s the trick: context can be established across several brand touchpoints. It can be nuanced. I can be created, curated and developed over time. You don’t have to scream it from the rooftops or, say, slap a big dirty BONDI on the tin.
Just as true luxury brands wouldn’t dream of using the word luxury, sometimes the products that “feel” the most Bondi — if we’re taking Bondi to mean health-conscious, design-forward, beach-luxe — are those that don’t say it at all. Venroy. Orchard Street. Lucy Folk. Bed Threads. Raconteur. Slow House. Fishbowl. Not only do they feel the most authentically Bondi, but they haven’t sold their souls in order to achieve it. If public perception of the word Bondi shifts, as words are wont to do, these brands are pretty safe.
How do you do it? First, get really clear on what you’re trying to express and why. Then, consider how this is kept consistent across all of your brand touchpoints: fonts, colour palettes, written assets, emails, in-store experiences. We mean everything. Consistency is key. What words are you using that can build positive associations? Possibly more importantly, are there any words that might confuse or detract from the context you want consumers to apply to your brand?
GOOD NATTER:
What Happens When a Destination Becomes a Brand?
3.Amplify
It’s not a conversation if no one’s listening. Cleverly amplifying the message to the right audience, at the right time, is the final piece of the puzzle.
Sure, affiliations and brand partnerships as part of an amplification strategy would typically fall under our “Act” pillar, but we’re writing about a beach as though it’s a person, so things are going to be a little upside down.
While Bondi as a concept lends itself to beige colour palettes, strong core muscles, earnest detoxes through the week and infamous retoxes on a Sunday, it would be remiss of us to ignore the fact that Bondi itself, the physical kilometre stretch of sand, has generated plenty of headlines for brands. Simply because they’re spotted on it.
In this way, Bondi Beach in the literal sense functions almost like a Kardashian or a member of BTS. Kylie spotted wearing your cap? Sell out. Jungkook spotted with a brand of fabric softener? It’ll sell out so fast it damages the supply chain (this actually happened). Netflix throws a portal on the beach? You better believe that’s goin’ viral. In fact, in the article we just linked Bondi is mentioned even before the Empire State Building.
Yes, any large-scale out of home activation is going to get attention, but to really amplify that attention and get your money’s worth it’s all about location, location, location. And Bondi’s a triple threat: organic foot traffic, stunning good looks and global intrigue. It could well be that Bondi Beach itself is the original influencer.
Before social media became the dominant format, Bondi was doing the TV rounds: Bondi Rescue, Bondi Vet, Bondi Ink as well as the yet-to-be-aired Made In Bondi all capitalise on Bondi’s icon status. Then there’s the Bondi Hipsters. This is a beach with a long and storied history of public fascination that doesn’t appear to be fading, and knowing how to tap into that with the right placement can do wonders for your reach.
GOOD NATTER:
Every Icebergs activation ranked.
Picks & Recs
THINGS TO LOVE ABOUT ACTUAL BONDI
A #9 with ham in the window of La Piadina at 11am on a Sunday.
A cheeseburger from The Beaver Dining Parlour on an early Friday evening. Well, at any time really.
Uber rides from North Bondi to South Bondi.
The Skin-Glowing Smoothie at Health Emporium sometime before 10am on a sunny weekend (and when you have money to burn).
Living a 5 minute walk from Bondi beach but driving to Kutti Beach in Sydney Harbour for a swim.
That blue apartment building at North Bondi at sunset.
People watching. At all times and all places.
Playing pool at Beach Road on a sunny afternoon.
The blissful 30 seconds of silence after the Brazilian drum circle stops. Finally.
Looking over a good spot on The Knoll from the real hill locals sit on.