Curious what The Happiness Idea is all about? Where they’ve been and why? Click below to watch a little about how happy is truly achievable!
UPDATE: Freitag didn’t choose us as their 2019 EVP, but soldier on we shall! Congratulations to Allan Dransfied and Tim Krohn who were chosen as Co-Pleasidents for Freitag! May they succeed in their mission to make the world a happier place indeed! Read more about Freitag’s choice for “Pleasident” here.
Zurich, SWITZERLAND — On December 25th, applications close for a very exciting and most unusual role! Zurich-based tarp bag-maker Freitag will nominate one-lucky-somebody to be their Executive Vice “Pleasident.” As it turns out, Freitag are celebrating their 25th birthday. To mark the occasion, they have skipped the branded corporate jet and bottle of Cristalle and instead decided to help make the world a happier place. The “Pleasident” they hire will be responsible for developing and actioning campaigns and initiatives around the world that bring as much happiness to as many people as possible. (We know, we know! We’re trembling with excitement too!)
Freitag’s backstory leaves us as tickled as we were when we launched the concept for The Happiness Idea in 2016. In a Zurich flat-share back in 1993, it all started with a dirty and discarded truck tarp and an old sewing machine. A quarter-century later, Freitag have crafted 4 million unique bags made from tarps from eighty-five thousand trucks. They’ve created twelve thousand pairs of biodegradable pants. They employ two hundred workers and they have fans all around the world. And Freitag is committed to growing sustainably.
Freitag’s story is inspiring for us here at The Happiness Idea. We know from experience that growing a vision into a reality is a really hard thing to do. There are the non-believers who say you can’t do it, shouldn’t do it, won’t do it, that it’s a waste of time and no one will be interested in what you’ve done even if you do, err do, it. There are bugs in code. Videos in your website that are maddeningly left-justified instead of centered and you can’t figure out why. There are social media haters to whom you must be nice in return.
And then there are days — perhaps when you’re working from your kitchen in your underpants — when you get a message from a follower thanking you for how much you helped him by crowdsourcing the toothbrushes he needed to cart up to the Himalayas. But Freitag have done it. By now they’re twenty-five years in. There’s a lot we hope to learn from their story, their vision, and their persistence.
This week, we’ll hit ‘send’ on our application to be Freitag’s Executive Vice Pleasident. It took several days and many iterations to create our video, which you can watch by clicking above. Melissa, our editor, is responsible for the bulk of the vision behind its narrative arc. And her graphics give us warm fuzzies every time we watched the video — which was a lot of times because it was really important to us to get it right!
If you’d like to support us in our bid to become Freitag’s Executive Vice Pleasident for Global Happiness, potentially the very best job title on planet Earth, then please do watch and share our video! Fist bump for happy! First bump for collaboration!
One final thought from Freitag’s website: “Freitag knows one thing for sure: that life is about a lot more than plans. Or tarps.”
We’re crowdsourcing these items
Role as "Pleasident"
GiveWe want to help Freitag celebrate their 25th anniversary by helping them make the world a happier place.