A new symbol of hope for the Ocean
Introducing a brand for ocean exploration and rewriting the human-ocean narrative.
The relationship humans have with our understanding of the Ocean has been very broken for some time now. Something like a toxic, bad relationship or marriage. For some reason — we can’t seem to break the cycle. We anchor it in our mind to the wrong things.
Right now, as you’re reading this, say “Ocean” in your head. What are the words you think of? Vastness? Breadth? Pollution? Plastic? Mysticism and the unknown? Fish? Creatures? Salty? Abyss? Bleached Coral? Mermaid… were a few of the answers I got back from people close to me. Though, I think a friend of mine outlined his thinking well after he gave me a few words of his own: “Oddly though, one thing that doesn’t come to mind — for some reason — is a nice beach. I picture a turbulent storm with no land in sight”.
We began using it as a food source — a seemingly limitless supply of marine life to eat. We’ve used it as a trash can — munitions, space-ships, a garbage dump with no consequences & limitless volume and capacity. We’ve drilled & spilled oil — decimating ocean environments and the animals that live within them.
Most importantly, we’ve continued to do all this while incorrectly underestimating it’s direct correlation to the future of humanity’s longterm safety on this planet.
We’ve misunderestimated its power, influence, and current health.
We hear terrible things with no understanding or proposals of solutions toward changing it. That negatively frames our trains of thought, fuels the “we can’t do anything about it” mindset, and diminishes the power of positively reinforced thinking to inspire a different, better future.
We lack a clear mission to work toward mutually — to align us all.
There are no defining ocean movements that have the impact and importance of NASA or SpaceX. Despite the Ocean’s influence, Outer Space seemingly feels closer and is more approachable to us all than the Oceans.
We think that’s something that needs to change.
When it comes to the Ocean and its relationship with the climate and many earth-ecosystems — humans are in desperate need of a new narrative, focus, and symbol to represent that new movement. We believe that narrative should be built on:
Hope.
Progress.
And Innovation.
This is what we set out to create when we began working on the Bedrock brand. Something distinct. Bold. At its core, embracing the Ocean’s deep tie with our own livelihood here on land. Illuminating the information we need and highlighting the chance that someone may be able to pull this off.
We wanted to build something people can rally around. Something that challenges the ocean status quo as we know it — a distinct symbol toward a shift of vision, understanding, and respect. We acknowledge the current state the world is in. There’s a lot we need to change. Quickly. We need to reframe the way humans think about the Ocean, right now.
If we want to make an impactful difference, quickly — in the next 10 years — we need radical thinking and belief. We need hope. We need people believing in something much more significant than themselves and their own bubble.
In the 1960s, people believed we were going to get to the moon, not understanding how or if it was possible. Looking back at the technology available — it still seems far fetched. But people believed it must be done — and humans successfully executed on an improbable mission, with thousands of failure points, because people believed it needed to happen.
This was the symbol of that movement:
In our opinion — it is one of the most impactful brands ever created. It changed the world. It gave people something they so desperately needed and a place to derive motivation and innovation at an astonishing and remarkable rate.
Humanity needs the same excitement and commitment for the Oceans that we have to Space. We need a “SpaceX” for the Oceans. We believe the current best place to build an equivalent brand is in the private technology sector where people are still willing to take massive bets on the front-lines of what’s possible. Where we can scale a global team and movement — because the oceans affect us all — no matter where or who you are.
No matter what color your skin is.
No matter how rich, poor, or lucky you’ve been in your life.
No matter how much you agree or disagree with a political party or bureaucratic ideal — the ocean affects you.
We wanted a symbol of that type of belief but specifically aimed at the Ocean. This is what we came up with:
While small local movements are vitally important to the hyper-local health, the Ocean requires massive, scalable solutions to solve its problems and further uncover its mysteries. This will require talent, resources, and a new organization to drive this past the inadequacies of bureaucracy and the current status quo.
While technology hasn’t gotten the best rep over the past 10 years, we know that technology is a vital component to successfully achieving any sort of scale in the Ocean. We need radical progress in an environment humans will never be biologically designed to thrive in. There are troves of data to be collected, organized, and made available to the immense computing power that we now have. We hope to facilitate that for the world through great technology improvement and development.
We’re committed to making Bedrock not just another company, but the symbol of a new human-ocean narrative we so desperately need.
