[SXSW London] Sam Bompas: There's a joy in jelly

How a weekend jelly stand grew into a studio building museums across the world

Marketing Report is at SXSW in London. We are invited at Bompas & Parr for a presentation of co-founder Sam Bompas, the creative force behind one of Britain's most inventive food and experience studios: Bompas & Parr.

The conversation begins, fittingly, with a wobble. On screen is a jelly built for Louis Vuitton's 200th anniversary, moulded into the brand's iconic trunk and then pelted with objects in extreme slow motion. "There's a joy in jelly," is how the co-founder sums up a career that started with little more than that conviction.

No clients, just conviction

The studio's origins were deliberately unglamorous. Bompas and Parr, who met at thirteen in the orchestra at Eton and went into business together in 2007, began by making jellies and staging events simply because they wanted to. There was no client list to fall back on. "When we started out making jellies and putting on events, we had no clients. We only did stuff because we really loved it, and we'd have to sell tickets in order to make the money back. So it's a really rigorous approach."

That ticket-funded discipline still shapes the work. What began as a jelly stall destined for Borough Market has become a multidisciplinary studio of designers, architects, chefs and strategists, trusted by brands such as Diageo, Coca-Cola and Mercedes and by cultural institutions including the V&A and The Met.

From jelly moulds to museums

Today the ambitions are built on an architectural scale. The studio is opening museums around the world: an ice cream museum in Berlin, a newly opened food museum in Saudi Arabia, and a Shakespeare museum in London. The last of these came as a personal surprise.

"I never thought I'd be interested in Shakespeare. Now I'm really into it," he admits. It points to what he sees as his most useful professional trait: "One of the benefits I have is that I can become interested in almost anything, then go very deeply into it and find the joy of it."

Finding what a brand can no longer see

That same instinct drives the studio's commercial work. The job, as he describes it, is often archaeological, uncovering something a company has stopped noticing about itself. "Quite often it's finding something the brand is doing that has almost become invisible to the brand over the years. If a brand can afford to pay us, there's something really special about them, iit just might not be visible to them anymore. Then it's about amplifying it, getting into it, and telling it."

Shakespeare, commerce and the creative engine

The Shakespeare project has sharpened a wider thesis about creativity and money, two forces he refuses to treat as opposites. The playwright, he argues, was a commercial animal first. "Shakespeare was operating in an unbelievably commercially competitive time, and that's why he kept writing all those plays. As soon as he'd made his fortune and stopped making money, he stopped. He retired, broke his wand in The Tempest, went home, sat in the country and drank."

The moral, for him, is that commercial pressure and creative output feed each other: "That need to make money and be commercially competitive is a really important driver."

Why London hits the sweet spot

It also explains his affection for London as a base. The city, he suggests, is competitive enough to push people forward but forgiving enough to let them fail in interesting ways. "London has a sweet spot in terms of creativity, because it's very commercially competitive, so people are forced ever onwards. But at the same time it's not quite as aggressive as New York. There's just enough space for people to experiment, play with ideas and get things wrong."

New York, by contrast, runs hot. "When I'm in that city for four days - it's fun, it's beautiful - I've had enough."

Cooking with lava in the desert

The most extreme illustration of the studio's method is Forces of Nature, a restaurant built in AlUla, Saudi Arabia - the world's largest UNESCO World Heritage Site, roughly the size of Belgium. The brief was to explain the terroir and why civilisation took root there. The answer involved making actual lava.

The idea traced back to a sculpture professor at Syracuse University in New York, who had once melted a slab of local topography in a blast furnace. The process took 72 hours and an enormous amount of gas - but when they poured it out, they realised they had made lava. After cooking with it himself, Bompas spent a decade pitching the concept. "It took me a decade of pitching 'let's make a lava-based restaurant' until finally someone signed it off."

There was a catch. By the time the project was greenlit, the professor had become his university's admissions tutor and couldn't disappear into the desert for a month. His parting advice was less than reassuring: "Sam, it took me fifteen years to hone the process. You've got three months. Good luck."

The solution was characteristically resourceful. The studio brought in a couple of workers from the north of England, a region where the contracting steel industry had left skilled people with real experience of handling hot materials and bought a blast furnace from China, much of it arranged on trust, sight unseen.

It is, in miniature, the whole Bompas & Parr philosophy: take a wild idea, fund the curiosity, and find the joy in it - whether that idea wobbles on a plate or pours molten from a furnace.

bompasandparr.com

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