Spaces&Places is a collection of stories about memorable experiences. Some by design, others by serendipity.

A few months ago my dear friend Paul and his girlfriend Abei got married. They live in Perth, Australia. I wanted to get them something special to wish them well so I gave them a boomerang. I know it sounds like a cheesy gift but there’s more to the story. You see, this wasn’t just any boomerang but the first boomerang I ever owned. It was my favorite boomerang ever and it hurt to let go of it. Seriously, I loved that boomerang. But the reason I gave something away that hurt to let go of is tied to another boomerang.

I started throwing boomerangs in my 20’s. The left-brain side of me was fascinated how a piece of wood could fly through the air so gracefully. The right-brain side of me just loved how cool they looked. Over the course of a dozen years I amassed probably 20 different boomerangs in various styles and colors.

About that same time, a bunch of us creatives in the Norfolk/Va. Beach area had a monthly rotating poker game and one of our newest members was a designer named John Koehler who had moved to the area a few years earlier. After months of playing with us, John offered to host a game at the studio he built above his garage. It was a large space, probably 25′ x 25′ with a peaked ceiling, lots of light and at least four workstations set up around the perimeter of one large room. Oh, and one more thing–the walls were covered from top to bottom with mounted boomerangs. WTF?! My jaw dropped when I walked in. There was easily over a hundred of them. Turns out before John was a designer, he was a world champion boomeranger. He even went on Foster’s world tour. Yes, he got paid to travel around the world to throw boomerangs.

All through the evening as we’re playing cards, there was one boomerang out of the hundreds on the walls that I couldn’t stop staring at. It was completely different than all the rest. I finally had to ask John about it. John told me that it was an original 75-year old hand-cut Aboriginal hunting boomerang from Australia. It was the second oldest boomerang he owned. I told him I had never seen anything like it and just found it fascinating. And that’s when John gave me the boomerang. Yep. Just like that. He said if I liked the boomerang that much, then it should be mine. It is a gesture that I have never forgotten.

That boomerang has been mounted on the wall of my office ever since. And over the years, I’ve made it a point to give away things that are special to me to people who are special to me. Because when it hurts to let something go, it means that much more.

And that’s why I sent Paul and Abei a boomerang.

Plus it didn’t hurt that the year John won the World Championship, it was held in Perth. 🙂

Some years ago I was at a party for an architecture firm in downtown Minneapolis. They had just completed the renovation of an iconic 1960s-era roadside hotel and the finished product was just gorgeous. As I was talking to one of the partners, I asked if they had given any thought to doing a deeper dive into storytelling in the spaces they were working in. After about 15 minutes of trying unsuccessfully to explain the bigger idea I was driving at, I noticed plans they had on a nearby desk for a new dentist office. And this was the story I told them…

Let’s say that before you even begin to design a dentist office, you find out a little more about the dentist. And let’s just say that in those conversations, you find out why your dentist became a dentist. You know… their story. And let’s say it turns out that your dentist became a dentist because as a 12-year-old hockey player he lost his front tooth in a game and had to get a new tooth. And for some reason that experience stuck with him so by the time he graduated from high school, he had decided on dentistry as his career path, which eventually brought everyone together years later to design his new offices.

With that information, in addition to designing a new office, you can also tell his story. Maybe you tell that story in the waiting area. Maybe its a small tooth encased in acrylic on the wall next to an old hockey stick with a short paragraph that tells you why your dentist became a dentist. However you tell the story, the important part is that when the next young hockey player–or anyone else for that matter–is sitting in the waiting area, they’ll have a chance to get to know their dentist before they may even meet him.

In that case, you’ve not just designed a waiting area, you’ve created the beginnings of a relationship.

And isn’t that what building a brand is all about?

Retail experiences have come a long way in the past decade. Apple’s new floating store in Singapore’s Marina Bay is just the latest example of innovative ideas, all designed to enhance the shopping (and brand) experience.

And while I am a huge fan of bold architecture and the use of technology advances such as augmented reality, my favorite brand experience has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with a company that truly understands its audience and what it values most. And that company is Build-a-Bear Workshop.

I know it sounds like an unexpected choice but ‘bear’ with me. As a father, what I valued most was quality time with my daughter while she was growing up. Because you never get that time back. And a Build-A-Bear store experience was quality time from the minute you walked in their door right up to the cash register you finally arrived at an hour later.

It started with a simple $10 bear and it ended with a $45 member of the family. In between, I watched my daughter put a heart inside the bear, record her own message she could hear when she squeezed the bear, dress it just how she wanted to from an array of clothing choices, and then add any kind of crazy accessories from caps to sunglasses and more. The first time we went there, I remember thinking was ‘How did that $10 bear become a $45 bear?’

And then I realized that spending an hour building a bear with my daughter was priceless.

My mother was the youngest of four sisters. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was 12 and she dropped out of school after the 8th grade to help support the family. In the 1930’s and 40’s, many Swiss and Germans who lived and worked in the greater New York City metropolitan area would spend time in the Catskill region of South Central New York when treating tuberculosis.

It was there that her widowed mother developed friendships that led her to meet and marry Arthur Von Berg in her late 40’s. Arthur had a small chicken farm in Maryland, NY and barely made ends meet. Subsequently he wasn’t up to the standards of my mothers other sisters. Because of this, they considered Arthur a ‘dirt-poor chicken-farmer’ and refused to visit their mother which, at that time in the early 1940’s, was a 7-hour trip from the city by car.

When my father returned from World War II in 1945, he and my mother decided to ‘take a drive’ and go visit Maryland, NY for a weekend. They had such a wonderful visit with Arthur and my grandmother, they came back a month later. Then again, and again. When my brother and sister were born, they would spend their summers up there and eventually when I came along years later, I did too. My father would take a bus up from the city on weekends in the summer and always gave Arthur a few extra dollars to help with the farm.

When Arthur’s health started failing in 1960, he sold the farm to my father for a dollar. In the 1980’s, my father passed it along to my brother and sister. It is now on its third generation of family ownership and next year will mark the 75th year where five generations of family and friends gather dozens of times each year to celebrate at this truly special place–this ‘dirt-poor chicken farm’–that sits on Platt Hollow Road.