It started at a meeting with me, my studio heads and the new business executive. Our new biz exec brought us together to brainstorm on how to really make a visual impact on this room they were planning to do an big pitch in. We spit-balled some ideas about how we could hang big foam boards with the display print, maybe paint the walls, and other little decorative ideas. And then I remembered we had some extra substrate material in our stocks that we could run through the large format printers. This substrate had a light adhesive background, so technically, you could use it as a wallpaper.

So I threw out a dumb idea. Since we had some time before this presentation, I proposed we get a test roll of this substrate and try printing out some tests of the design that they had in mind to put on one of the walls just to see if it would stick like a temporary wallpaper.

My studio head gave me a sideways glance as if to say “Are you sure this will work?” and “What the hell are you getting us into?” And to his credit, he asked me point blank, “Do you think you could pull that off?”

And stupid me said, “Yeah, I think we can.”