Strategy

Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.
-Abraham Lincoln

I’ve often said that if you can talk, you can write. All the difference is made in the preparation. If you have a deep understanding of your audience, what they want and how they want to be approached, the words themselves will fall into place. Throughout my career I’ve placed as much, if not more, value on drafting strategy and process alongside the actual nuts-and-bolts of writing. Let me take you through my process:

A New Market

Chrome has always been associated with punks and bike hooligans. Not wanting to just stay in their lane, Chrome wanted to develop a line of bags that would target a new customer who liked Chrome’s durability and no-nonsense functionality but wasn’t going to rock a messenger bag every day. Through planning meetings we established our target customer as someone who wasn’t necessarily a hardcore cyclist but still had the savvy to navigate transportation of all types, from bus to train to plane. I wanted a name that captured the feeling of surefootedness on any type of terrain, and, after a few rounds of ideas, I landed on Treadwell. I also named each of the bags after space missions: Juno, Vega, Hightower, Osiris.

In talks with the bag designer, we discussed the identity of the Treadwell bags and drilled down into how to pitch these bags to a target customer who worked a 9 to 5-type job but would be attracted to the outlaw nature of Chrome and the rugged-yet-sleek ballistic nylon bags of the Treadwell Collection. I eventually developed the tagline that would drive the first campaign: “Badass Bags for the Modern Road Warrior”

Below you can read the PR sheet I put together with our designer. After many conversations about matching the visual language with the spirit of the collection, we landed on urban textures with black and gold as our core palette.

Treadwell-bots, Roll Out!

Once we had developed names, visual style, hangtags and target audience, the next step was to create a go-to-market strategy that covered digital and in-store experiences. I built a blog as a landing page for our PR and digital ad outreach as well as a deep-dive email that would reach our email list. In addition we seeded product to magazines and blogs that would reach our target customer like Wired and Carryology and identified important SEO keywords that we targeted with some ad dollars.

On the retail front we orchestrated a full-window takeover of our 7 retail stores with product layouts and a lightbox and window cling as well as building out detail sheets for each of the bags. In order to drive some excitement around both Treadwell and our hubs, I also created a social hashtag giveaway called #ChromeSpotCheck that encouraged people to tell us about their favorite spots in their city on Instagram for the possibility to win some cool swag from local vendors in the neighborhood of one of our stores. #ChromeSpotCheck netted hundreds of entries in the first couple months of the initiative. For social ads, we developed a set of stop-motion videos featuring the bags and a target city which we seeded out on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter via paid push.

Below you can find examples of the landing page, email and in-store infopages.

We Are Everywhere

With the addition of two new bags to the Treadwell collection, I was tasked with putting together a campaign built around a core video that would be eye-catching, cool and bring some urban vibes to the collection.

I wrote up a brief for the tremendously talented team at Endless Eye that provided context, a framework for the shoot as well as some sample music and imagery for creative direction. I also traveled to Los Angeles to assist as producer on the shoot (& yeah, I am also in the video, man bun and all) provided feedback to the editor and sourced the music for the final cut.

Once the video was completed, we rolled out with a second round campaign for Treadwell entitled “We Are Everywhere” with a store window takeover, digital coverage from emails, blog and social, more PR placement in mags like TechCrunch and Outside.

Below, check the blog post and video.