Think about it: when a product range and a content project come together with something to say

The client:

Kingswood Skis is a boutique ski manufacturer based in Lyttelton. Each pair is handmade and custom made by the company founder. He finds out how and where you like to ski and the builds the tools you need. For this project, I had the freedom of being my own client. Almost. I am 50% shareholder in Kingswood Skis. My husband is the other 50%.

The brief:

To stand out we decided we needed to stand up - and stand for something. As a small, privately-owned company, this should be easy. Our values should be the company values. But it took us a long time to get the confidence to take this stand. I mean, what if some people don’t agree with us? Won’t they be turned off?

We decided to be brave and create a limited edition topsheet series with images from Unsplash. We chose images that we loved but that also got us thinking...and then we expressed that thinking in a related content series.

The execution:

We created a series of five limited-edition, numbered topsheets. Each topsheet had a related article about impacts humans are having on the planet.

The rational was this, “When it comes to global warming, skiers should be paying attention. We’re using our latest topsheet range as a conversation starter for issues that affect our planet. These are things we think about - things that matter to us. What do you think about?”

The jellyfish topsheet looked at how these species are thriving in our warming oceans and even breeding in the plastic rubbish strewn through them. The fire topsheet looked back on how fire (and cooking) helped the human brain evolved language and contrasted that to the burning of fossil fuels that now threatens our survival. We tackled population growth (and David Attenborough’s surprisingly feminist solution) as well as food waste and sea level rise.

We added a MailChimp sign-up to each blog post so that skier could register their interest in that particular topsheet.

The result:

The truth is that this campaign seemed polarising. We delivered each blog by email over five days and we did see quite a few people unsubscribe. On the other hand, we had more people than ever reply with effusive praise. We sold a few pairs of skis that we might not have sold otherwise, but in the end we felt we probably meant more to the people who mattered and we stopped wasting the time of the people who didn’t. The content in this series - with its clear viewpoint - did what content does better than anything: it gathered our tribe closer.

Read the whole Think About It series on Medium.