Part 3: The Overlooked R’s: Reduce and Reuse “We must also stop looking at recycling as an excuse for excessive consumption and remember the other R’s that come first: reduce and reuse.” – Sappi, Rethinking Recycling Thankfully, recycling has become almost a given in the corporate world and the majority of homes. But it’s time […]
Supply Chain Woes & Communicating with Your Customers The global supply chain is in crisis. The scarcity is real, and for most retailers – the occasional backorder went from a low-grade and fairly infrequent problem to major outages, much of the time, and backorders of 3-4 months are increasingly common. Customer reactions range from anger […]
MoMA: From Studio to Catalog Somewhere just south of Central Park comes a catalog you might not know existed, but that you’ve certainly heard the name of. A catalog built on design, on art, and most importantly on bringing their principles to the world. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), striking yet inconspicuous, sits between […]
A Conversation Over Tea Over the past several weeks, we’ve looked at a variety of brands and how they approach their catalog. As you may have noticed, there are many different ways to achieve the same goals of DISRUPT. DELIGHT. DRIVE. How brands stand out in the mail, engage their target customer (or even better, […]
Doing Cartwheels for Summersalt “It can always be better.” This is a declaration that drives my creative principles. I think if you ask most creators, we all want to improve upon our previous work. We want our next work to be our best work. And the work after that to be even better. It can […]
Last week I said the following to a fellow Schmidling (yes, that’s what we call each other): “Wow, we could really make their catalog sing!” What a strange idiom. Or is it? I love listening to my favorite musicians for a reason. Yip Harbor, who wrote Somewhere Over the Rainbow, offers the reason why. […]
Part 5: Left-Brain Creative Creative and analytics teams are drastically different disciplines, driven by different personalities and workflows, which means that merging them takes purposeful planning. The timeline is the first big challenge. The creative team looks ahead, creating new campaigns to be launched in the future while analytics teams review the past, examining what […]
Streaming platforms saw huge success in the past year. It’s unfortunate that the global COVID-19 pandemic was the cause. It has been a challenging time for many marketers, particularly retail. But as we think back on the difficulties of the past year, we can see successes, and learn from them. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, […]
Part 5: The Art of the CTA Ah, the ubiquitous—and critical—Call to Action. Great branding, sumptuous, emotional or humorous creative, a strong voice: they are the vessels that hold the CTA. The ask: to buy now; sign-up; get more information; go online; hurry, don’t miss this sale. For every response-driven tactic we create—from catalogs to […]
