Coraggio Member spotlight: Emotional Baggage and the power of carrying the long game

At Coraggio, we celebrate members who understand that progress — whether in business, leadership, or life — is rarely a straight line.

It’s shaped by wins and losses. Momentum and setbacks. Confidence, doubt, reinvention, and persistence.

That’s why we’re proud to spotlight one of our Members for leading Emotional Baggage. A project that uses AFL culture as a powerful metaphor for what it means to stay committed through long periods of uncertainty.

In collaboration with clothing brand Mitchell and Ness and advertising agency 2045, our Member and his studio ATKM were tasked to create 18 bags, one for each AFL club, designed to physically represent the emotional baggage carried by supporters.

But at its core, this wasn’t a football project.

It was a human one.

Underlying the entire project is the way ATKM approaches making as a practice. As a studio, ATKM designs and produces everyday bags and carry goods intended for long-term use — pieces shaped by proportion, material honesty, and construction that improves with time. The team is comprised of skilled makers, favouring processes that prioritise durability, repairability, and restraint over novelty or trend. That approach informed Emotional Baggage from the outset. The project wasn’t conceived as a set of symbolic gestures, but as a collection of objects that needed to feel credible — grounded in real-world making, and capable of carrying meaning precisely because they could plausibly carry weight.

The project began with the Emotional Baggage Index, developed by 2045. Instead of tracking performance, it measured lived experience: success, failure, near misses, controversy, tragedy, resilience, and renewal.

Our Member and the ATKM team used this framework as a real design input. The scores determined the dimensions of each bag. The more emotional weight a supporter base had carried, the larger the bag became.

From there, the team undertook deep research into every AFL club — not just their achievements, but their eras of decline, their cultural identities, their turning points, and their long periods of rebuilding.

The ambition wasn’t to create commentary about football ladders. It was to reflect what long-term commitment feels like when outcomes are uncertain.

A reality that feels very familiar to anyone who has built a business, led a team, or stayed invested in something meaningful over time.

This project is especially relevant to Coraggio because it came from lived perspective.

Our member grew up supporting the Western Bulldogs. For decades, losing was normal. Progress was slow. Hope was fragile.

But you showed up anyway.

You believed anyway.

You learned how to sit with disappointment without disengaging.

For many Bulldogs supporters, success didn’t arrive for 50 years. For him, closer to 40, before the 2016 premiership finally came.

He’s spoken about how powerful that moment felt. Not just as a win, but as a validation of endurance.

And that insight sits at the heart of Emotional Baggage.

Because following a team over decades quietly teaches lessons that translate far beyond sport: how to persist when results don’t match effort, how to absorb setbacks without losing belief, how to stay invested when there is no guarantee of payoff.

The same emotional terrain business leaders and founders navigate every day.

Once the emotional weight was established, materials became the next layer of meaning.

Older clubs were expressed through leather — materials that age, mark, and accumulate character over time. Newer clubs explored canvas, vinyl, suede, and sailcloth — materials that feel more adaptive, contemporary, and still in formation.

Each bag was designed to feel like a serious object. Plausible. Useful. Built to carry weight.

Not novelty items but physical metaphors.

The goal was to take something invisible — loyalty, frustration, optimism, identity — and give it form.

Each bag tells a story that extends well beyond football.

Carlton became an oversized attaché briefcase heavy with expectation.

Essendon took the form of a modular doctor’s bag shaped by damage, repair, and attempts to reset.

North Melbourne became a wheeled travel bag designed around survival, movement, and reinvention.

St Kilda emerged as the largest piece in the collection overfilled, wipe-clean, built around heartbreak and the willingness to start again.

And the Western Bulldogs were represented by a small worker’s kit bag inspired by the 1950s and 60s practical, honest, resilient.

Across the collection, the bags speak to cycles leaders know well: growth, pressure, reinvention, confidence, collapse, rebuilding, belief.

At Coraggio, we’re not interested in surface-level success stories.

We’re interested in what people carry on the way to building something worthwhile.

Emotional Baggage doesn’t celebrate winning. It acknowledges staying.

Staying through uncertainty.
Staying through long rebuilds.
Staying through criticism, doubt, and disappointment.

It reflects a truth our members live every day: that meaningful progress is emotional, uneven, and cumulative.

We’re proud to celebrate this member not only for the outcome of the project, but for the perspective behind it and for reminding us that what we carry shapes how we lead.

And that sometimes, the weight is the work.