Creating Profiles for The Moomins

natural to have Alfie Atkins as a part of Rights & Brands. Bok-Makaren is doing a fantastic job of developing high-quality content that we will build on when finding new partners and continue to develop existing ones.” On a different note, Rights & Brands is proud to welcome Finnish artist Teemu Järvi. Teemu Järvi is an artist and designer of many talents. He specializes in wilderness themes and his art and projects include a wide range of printmaking, book and magazine illustrations as well as product designs and concepts. Rights & Brands will represent Teemu Järvi for merchandising and publishing rights. The works of Teemu Järvi derive from the artist’s lifelong love of nature. A ceaseless explorer of Finnish woods and lakes, Järvi is familiar with the wildlife through first-hand experience. He works with traditional tools such as the reed pen, creating works of art that transport us from our hectic urban existence to the soothing calm of primeval wilderness. Regarding the Moomins, LLP SA has launched Moomin licensed collections for their brands Cropp, Reserved and Sinsay, in physical stores and online. The collections are designed in-house by LPP and have featured apparel and accessories for women and children. LPP S.A is a company with Polish roots that manages five recognizable brands: Sinsay, Reserved, House, Mohito, and Cropp. In the last 30 years, LPP Group has become the largest fashion company in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, they operate a chain of over 1700 stores across 40 countries worldwide. In terms of the Smurfs, Rights & Brands report that Finnish streetwear brand Billebeino just launched their latest collaboration. Billebeino has previously launched collections with both Popeye and The Beatles. For this third collaboration with Right & Brands, Billebeino has chosen to work with the world-famous blue characters: The Smurfs. Kid’s Concept and Rights & Brands are proud to present a new collection of items for the children’s room, inspired by the works of Carl & Karin Larsson and details found at the artist couple’s home, Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn – also known as Carl Larsson-gården. Kid’s Concept is a Swedish design company that creates functional and innovative products, aiming to spread joy and encouraging more play for all children. Together with the Carl & Karin Larsson estate, Kid’s Concept has created a collection of high-quality wooden toys and items such as doll wagon, rocking horse and games, and an apron in true Carl & Karin Larsson aesthetic. “Our hope is to pass on a bit of Swedish cultural heritage to future generations, in our own way. This is my interpretation of the bold colour palette, design language, and the fine details that can be found on the Carl Larsson estate and in his paintings.” says Lotta Hallenius, Designer and Product Developer at Kid’s Concept. Finally, the forever-joyful Swedish sock brand Happy Socks are back with an unforgettable experience for the ultimate Beatles fan – the Collector’s Edition Gift Set features 24 crowdpleasing pairs of socks, a 4-pack gift set and single pairs of socks featuring six new styles. The fab four are back again for an allout The Beatles bonanza. An endless source of inspiration, the legendary musical geniuses from Liverpool taught us that all we need is love! Now they’re back and ready to rock once more –in vibrant Happy Socks colors. Let it be an unforgettable experience for the ultimate Beatles fan.

Creating long-form profiles for The Moomins

Five copywriting tips for family brands

At Riot Communications, we’re lucky to have worked with some of the world’s most-loved family brands – from literary classics like Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, to stars of the screen including Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit. We were recently asked by our longstanding client Moomin Characters to pen new long-form profiles for all the key characters in Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories – which was a great honour, as these profiles are used so extensively, from the brand’s consumer-facing website to its guidelines for licensees – and it got us thinking about best practice when copywriting for family brands.

Here are five top tips we wanted to share:

Go back to the source

Whether the source material for the brand is a set of books, comics, scripts, a film, TV series or game, the best way to prepare for a copywriting task is to re-immerse yourself in the world of the brand as it was first imagined by its creator. What’s the atmosphere like? What are the values that come through in the source material? What stylistic choices have been made? What effect does that create? Actively thinking about these questions will deliver the best results – but even just reading a few pages or watching a couple of short clips should help get you into the right mindset.

Know your characters

We love working with character brands and have learnt a thing or two over the years about why certain characters appeal more deeply than others. The trick is tension – characters that are one-dimensional can serve a purpose, but the ones that stay with us are the ones who are more complex and contradictory. For example, in the Moomin stories, Moomintroll both loves adventure and continually seeks the warmth and safety of his family home. His best friend Snufkin is both fiercely independent and utterly reliable: although he leaves for a solo adventure each autumn, he faithfully returns to Moominvalley every spring. Finding the tension in your characters will help unlock what really makes them tick.

Pay homage

In most cases, you won’t want to be exactly mimicking the original creator or source material, but you should pay homage to their style – so it’s important to be familiar with it. What tone does the source material take? Are there particular sayings or turns of phrase that the creator (or characters) use? What reading age is it aimed at? Think about how you can capture something of the creator’s or the character’s voice in what you’re writing – this can be subtle yet still reminiscent of the original material.

Offer something for both children and adults

The most beloved family brands appeal to all ages by offering something for grown-ups as well as for kids. Can you work in some humour or philosophy or worldly wisdom that will speak to older readers, without making the text inaccessible or incomprehensible to children? The key to this is creating layers of meaning, so that different people can take different things from the text.

Have fun

This should be obvious – but if you’re not having fun writing something, how likely is it that people are going to have fun reading it? Be playful, be free, and let your love of the brand shine through. You can always tone it down in subsequent drafts, if required, but it’s better to have an abundance of enthusiasm that you can edit down later than not enough warmth or passion coming through in your writing. If you’re keen for further inspiration, you can read some of our new character profiles for Moomin Characters https://www.moomin.com/en/ blog/sniff/#1ef03f0b

By Caitlin Allen