Humboldt Redwood Company, a FSC-certified sustainable forestry company, wanted to increase their sales of redwood through the architecture industry.
We surveyed a group of architects to determine why they were not specifying redwood for their projects. The results revealed that architects believed it was environmentally irresponsible to use redwood and that due to the decline is use, the knowledge about how to use redwood had been lost.
This stigma around using redwood is based in history. In the 1980s and 90s, redwood forests in Northern California had been largely clear cut for their lumber and by 1999, the forests were in severe danger. In the last 17 years, however, the land has been bought by companies dedicated to sustainable forestry, who grow more than is harvested each year. Redwood is also the fastest growing softwood species in North America, meaning the trees excel at absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and redwood lumber products continue to sequester carbon throughout their long lifetime.
So, our direction was clear: we needed to re-educate architects about redwood. Many firms have lunch-and-learn presentations in their offices, so we decided to key off of that. We created a presentation that emphasized the environmental value of redwood, along with the sustainable forestry practices used by HRC. We also included a section of interesting work by architects to show the material's beauty.
Lunch-and-Learn Presentation
Spec Sheet Leave Behind
Along with the presentation, we created a spec sheet to leave behind after the presentations with practical information the architects would need to specify the wood for their projects.
Direct Mail Marketing
The feedback we received from the presentations was positive, but architects wanted samples of the wood to keep in their offices to help them sell the idea to clients. Our client, however, felt the idea was cost-prohibitive. We came up with the idea of sending postcards with true-to-scale photos of the wood as a reminder of their lunch-and-learn and to act as "samples" showing cut sizes and wood grain. The postcards went out in 2-month increments growing in scale to create impact.
Work done with the L Studio team. My roles included: research, project management, production, auxiliary design.
