CHARLOTTE — Cole Johnson says his 10-year-old entity, The Looma Project, was founded on a simple premise: that a growing number of shoppers want to know the people and stories behind the products they buy.
“The original idea was to pair independent creators (filmmakers) with impact-driven brands to produce short films highlighting the brand story,” Johnson said. “Those stories could then be accessed by scanning a QR code that was permanently embedded into the product — mostly apparel at the time.”
Realizing those QR codes were never really used, an idea for in-store screen displays popped in his head.
“One day, while visiting Southern Season for a class project at UNC, I remember thinking it was crazy I’d never really seen screens in stores that very simply explained the story behind various products and brands,” Johnson said. “… I just thought it can’t be that hard to install in-store screens to deliver these beautiful stories our filmmakers were producing.”
He quickly learned that task was “tremendously hard.” But now the company has a little over 5,000 screens deployed across various retailers around the U.S., representing the second largest deployment in the country, and revenue of $7 million, Johnson said.
Read more about his venture on CBJ’s website here.
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