Kingspan, an Irish manufacturer of architectural insulated mental panels for buildings, wished to make clear to its marketplace just how serious it is about sustainability, sourcing-to-disposal .
Kingspan commissioned my client Jib to create this website, pathtonetzero.com. I was asked to write it up.
It speaks volumes for itself, so I need not.
SOFA — that’s Source of Furniture and Accessories — is a brilliant Toronto invention. It’s 200,000 square-foot section of the International Centre is devoted to the furnishings & interior design industries of Canada, the US and beyond.
SOFA leases fully customizable private showroom spaces to manufacturers who use them to market products to the design and architectural trades.
I’ve worked with SOFA for a couple of years, writing the website, print ads and collateral for their team of very hardworking women. It’s a fairly new destination and not in the most glamorous of locations — Airport Rd — so it’s not the easiest of sells. But these girls hustle and are getting it done.
Remember Direct Mail? When I first got into this business it was huge, till digital came along and…
But, DM ain’t dead yet.
I’ve written several fine pieces with Messenger‘s Laura Wills for TTI Travel.
Some pages…
Just got my hands on the full set from Colin McRae, CD at Mo-Des Design (I believe client only ran first one).
The brief: Drive hard the notions that Merc’s four-stroke outboards neither burn oil, pump out skanky blue smoke nor bleed toxic rainbows all over the lake — unlike old school mixed-fuel two-strokes. And also that these bad boys are well known for their high quality of manufacturing, reliability, ludicrous power and civilized exhaust notes. (Except, as remarked, when corporal punishment occurs.)
Since I developed the tagline, several blend names, package copy and the website for Social Coffee Co. in collusion with Meta’s George Argyropoulos, they’ve done well. George’s brief was: “It’s called Social… client wants it to be about friendly-social shit, but that’s boring. I want it to be about Socialism, Commies and all that. The owner’s Laotian and I believe that is a Communist country. Bye.”
I struggled for cliches about Communism (it’s been a while, no?) and, locating several, filtered them in. (That’s no intentional coffee pun by the way, it was organic. I shun the pun. My crime is rhyme.)
Since launching in March ’10, Social’s proprietor, Steve, has shoved his sudden brand into the knives-out-competitive coffee markets, and is already selling it in quantity online, and pulling big awards at coffee shows.
The piece of news that moved me to post this, and attempt to take some credit, came Friday last when I was sitting in front of Manic Coffee on College St. chatting with one of the barmen, on his break. I asked if he knew of Social. “Yes. Social’s big now,” he replied. I asked if this was because of their amazing fun-poking Leftward branding. “Don’t know about that,” said he, adding, “but their coffee’s excellent.”
As founder of The Autists brand and event (a fundraiser benefiting Geneva Centre for Autism), I’d succeeded in getting a big network ad agency — MacLaren McCann Toronto — to do our ad campaign last year. This was in part because I wanted their logo on our sponsor list, and also because I figured, given a good long leash, they’d knock it out of the park creatively. For 2011, we also had a large American agency network’s head office lined up for just that, but then they got busy and we got close to deadlines on a load of free media space (the Globe, Star and Post). So I called on Laura Wills of Messenger, who was already helping us with invites and collateral, and asked her to art direct the ads. I did the writing and developed the concept of selling the art on auction, rather than focusing entirely on the charity. We used our biggest names — such as William S. Burroughs — to draw the gaze of art collectors. Here’s the campaign. (Note: The first ad did not run — we did not receive the painting due to various snafus.)
My client Jib has established a new search engine optimization service called the PAGEONE Program. The offer: Give us a reasonable sum of money (it’s generally under $5k) and we’ll get your website onto page one of a Google search for the keywords you want associated with your site and business — all within 60 days. They guarantee it and they’re getting it done large scale.
I was brought in to write the DM and website for the service, and also to edit a 60-page DIY book on maximizing SEO by Rob Campbell (aka Smojoe), who runs PAGEONE, a book they have decided not to publish. Why give away the golden goose?
When the supremely talented Laura Wills of Messenger — who has designed virtually the entire Southbrook brand from the ground up — asked me write their new website, I felt a distinct thirst for experience with this brand growing in me.
Among the world’s great wine makers Southbrook Vineyards of Niagara is a relatively new arrival. Organic, biodynamic and an exemplar of entrepreneurial shrewdness, the business is owned and operated by the husband and wife team of Bill and Marilyn Redelmeier. The wines produced at their small holdings draw international admiration. The vineyards and winery are a masterstroke of design and nature at its most elegant, while revealing the Redelmeiers’ mindblowing vision.
In the end, it was all pleasure. The work was often more of an edit, as the briefing notes I’d been given were so well written and frequently poetic — to the point where I sometimes struggled to improve on things.
Well, the Redelmeiers were happy and so was I, especially when I received a case loaded with Southbrook’s finest, including several vintage bottles.
Call it a thirst well quenched.
Enwave is the company that built and runs the network of pipes, pumps and heat exchangers that draw great volumes of icy water from the depths of Lake Ontario to chill the majority of large buildings in Toronto’s core. Aside from their Deep Lake Water Cooling, Enwave also owns significant district heating operations, warming many of those same buildings in winter from central plants downtown.
I was approached by Meta to exact an enlivening on the copy Enwave had provided for the website redesign. This consisted of tidying up, and condensing text, adding heads and subs and pulling together info chunks from disparate sources and unifying it into a whole. Note: I neither wrote nor edited the landing page copy — the rest, yes.
Designer Richard Marazzi approached me to collaborate on this, a bus-exterior campaign. I came up with the Autumnal Italy notion, for which Richard designed a banner to anchor it. I researched several fall fairs and these are some of the ads that came of it. They were to target those inclined less toward visiting leaning towers than to sampling Italy as locals do, via its seasonal food festivals. Too bad Alitalia Canada couldn’t use it.
