Too Innocent To Be Nudie?
Well. It feels like so much has happened in the last couple of months. Those on my email list will know the craziness that has happened in the last couple of weeks, so I won’t go into it here. Instead I’m going to focus on happier things. Like whether or not Nudie drinks are a rip-off of Innocent drinks, or whether it’s the other way around .
The reason this comes up is because Innocent held a free concert called Fruitstock in Regents Park on Saturday, and James, Jason (an ex-Perthian) and myself decided to attend aforementioned concert and enjoy the (free!) dulcet tones of Arrested Development. Innocent have a sweet ad campaign here, emphasising their use of Freetrade produce. However, we couldn’t help but notice that they have extremely similar packaging and marketing genius to Nudie drinks, from Australia. The question is: Which came first? The Nudie or The Innocent? Well, after extensive research (like, three webpages), I have found the following answer to my query: Innocent came first. According to The Australian newspaper, Innocent was the original influence behind Nudie drinks. Sigh. Poor little Australians have to confess to UK influence, yet again. Will we never escape from under the wing of the Motherland?
This leads me to wonder whether there are any major Aussie products that haven’t somehow been influenced by an invention somewhere else in the world. What came first, Marmite or Vegemite? Marmite, in 1902, according to the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia. So were Kewpie dolls around before Barbie? Was the Hills Hoist influenced by strings tied between trees all over the world? What about crease-free pants? Didn’t we have something to do with them as well?? I guess, at the very least, we can maybe argue that we invented pretty-boy, easy-to-market acapella harmony, with Human Nature beating Westlife to that niche market in the 90s. I think Westlife are Irish, but I couldn’t think of any other lame harmony-driven boyband, so they’re going to be representative of the UK boyband scene, for the sake of my musings.
Is there anything so wrong with being influenced, anyway? I guess it’s when the marketing stops thinking for itself, and just relies on already established, effective campaigns from over the world. When it becomes bang-wagon-ism, that’s when I feel a frown coming on. Are Nudie band-wagonning? Or should we just celebrate that more countries are involved in the ethical manufacture of tasty drinks, for peace-of-mind sipping on sultry Summer days?
(Oh, and the concert itself was okay. Some people climbed trees to try to see Arrested Development, which is alarmingly dedicated. We listened to one and a half songs, got upset when they tricked us into thinking a song was ‘Everyday People’ when it wasn’t, so we went to a nice Greek restaurant near Baker Street. There were too many people there as well, and not enough toilets. I made many friends in the two half hour queues I experienced. And there were too many people with too many mobile phones, so the networks were jammed. I should have brought my homing pigeon.)
March 24th, 2007 at 6:56 am
The story with Nudie is a bit more than ‘influenced’. A few years ago a man called Tim came over from Australia to talk to us about obtaining the license to run the innocent business in Oz. We were pretty excited - he seemed like a nice chap - so we started talking to Tim. He spent quite a bit of time at Fruit Towers getting to know us and the business.
After a while we had all of the legal papers drawn up, ready for Tim to become innocent. We were happy for him to carry on our good work on the other side of the world. But right at the last minute, Tim had a change of heart, decided not to sign and disappeared back off to Sydney.
Much to our surprise, a few months later a smoothie company called Nudie appeared in Australia. There were a few similarities to innocent. Things looked familiar. And the man behind Nudie? Why, Tim of course.