The Campaign idea: Sydney Just Got Closer. A simple integrated approach across all media that creatively connects Australia with New Zealand.

Media: Direct Mailer, Billboard, Radio, Press, Online and Taxi Cab Advertising throughout the Bay of Plenty, Rotorua, Gisborne and the Hawkes Bay.

Radio: (Click Link Below)

Boomerang Radio 30sec

Direct Mailer:

Billboard:

Florentines Patisserie. Specialist creators of hand crafted premium patisserie products. Working with Florentines, we have taken the traditional model of the patisserie; and through communicating their innovation, skills and experience established a brand that aligns with their business. Florentines creates and provides a huge variety of hand crafted recipes that taste homemade, while still being deliverable on a large-scale.

Brand Identity.

Brand Strategy.

International Product Brochure.

Packaging Range.

Staff Recognition Certificates.

Stationery.

Promotional Flyers.

Tradeshow Stand.

Brand Photography.

2009 wrapped itself up and we set about thanking our clients for their willingness to push their brand with our traditional Woods Creative Christmas gift. Over the past few years we have managed to incorporate both our personality and our culture into the gift, while still delivering something of value that can be realistically used.

2009 was a positive year for us, with some work we were particularly proud of produced. These results were in no small part due to working with some great cooperative clients who had the courage to be design-led with their brand.

To thank our clients for their support we wanted to return the favour in some small way. With our Christmas gift we wanted to encourage everyone to get out and get amongst it over summer, enjoy the break – whether it be here lapping up the sunshine at the sunny Papamoa Domain, or road tripping anywhere else in the country with good music turned up on the dial.

We decided to keep it simple and indulge ourselves in a play on words to carry our message home. ROLL ON SUMMER was plastered around cardboard (rolls) which were filled with Woods Creative branded towels carrying the reminder “We’ve got your back all summer long”. We hoped these towels got thrown in many a car boot to be used throughout summer up and down our beautiful coast, along our rivers and beside our lakes here in beautiful New Zealand.

The beauty of a towel is it has a variety of uses; makeshift pillow, sun screen, fly and mosquito whip, makeshift parachute, homemade land yacht sail, blanket, food coverer, boot liner, skipping rope, stylish summer scarf, batman cape, emergency tourniquet, pirate flag, emergency clothing attire, pipi sack, picnic blanket, water bomb carrier… basically ROLL ON SUMMER in New Zealand we say.

At Woods Creative we are passionate about the benefits of strategic design in business and love the ongoing involvement we have in our clients businesses as their chosen Strategic Design Partner.

As we have worked with many new and established companies over the years, there are a lot of case studies to upload and update. It takes time to get them all up on our website, so in the meantime we thought we would profile some of the brands we have developed and companies we work with. It is a great way to introduce who we have had the pleasure of working with over the last 6 years.

There are more, we will add them as we can but in the meantime remember strategic design creates the freedom for business to succeed, just ask any of the following companies below.

Providing Key Strategic Design to:
Priority One
Instep
Young Innovator Awards
Sustainable Business Network BOP

Professional Members of :
Priority One
Export NZ BOP
Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA)
Sustainable Business Network BOP (SBN)
Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ)

Our Clients Present and Past:
NZ Windows
Revive – Your Home
Florentines Patteserie
Oceanblue
Carlyle Drilling
BOP Regional Strategy
Aquaculture Strategy
Waihi Beach TOP 10 Holiday Resort
YMCA
HOTmilk
ShowOFF
TECT
Design Mobel
Sanctum Beauty Therapy
Aerocool
University of South Pacific
Tamarind House
Muri Beachcomber
The Orchard – Living as it should be
Te Waihou Water
Cook Islands NEWS
Environment BOP
TOTAL Horticulture
Excelso Coffee
Christian Surfers International
KiwiFresh
Sisters
Empty Backpacks
SportsStiks
BayWave
Homes of Hope
Freshwood
MOCA
Fullers
Comvita – Huni
Scion
ABN AMRO Craigs
HCB
Home Grown Kids

2009 BeST Design Awards – BRONZE WINNER
Category: Website Design & Interactive

The Brief:
Create a website for an international market that is heavily search engine optimised but still had a wow factor that amazed their audience.

HOTmilk is a New Zealand Based lingerie company that has grown rapidly to become a global leader, specialising in sexy pregnancy and nursing lingerie. The idea for the business was founded from the lack of sexy lingerie available to mums and mums to be. HOTmilk believes that sexy maternity lingerie plays such an important role towards empowering pregnant and breastfeeding women to look and feel as fabulous as they deserve.

The Result:
In order to reveal HOTmilk sexy online, the website needed to have some key functional elements coming through. First and foremost of these was to showcase what HOTmilk does, and where customers can get the product. Secondly was to have the website heavily search engine optimised for an international market. HOTmilk is a very special brand, with a very specific demographic. To really connect with customers of HOTmilk, and in order to create a credible wow factor, it was important for us to define exactly what ‘sexy’ is for HOTmilk the brand, and for HOTmilk’s pregnant and nursing mothers. Key words that resulted from this were – provocative, powerful, revealing, risqué, mysterious, secretive, naughty and alluring.

‘Reveal’ became the essence of the creative, and as we developed the site and mapped out the navigation, the personality of the brand really started to shine through. The key words helped shape and align the website to absolutely reflect HOTmilk. The only thing on the site that is even close to standard is the side navigation. Every other element online is a combination of secretive and interactive areas plus a host of cheeky reveals, even including a hidden section for the HOTmilk woman’s man. The finished site pushes the envelope in terms of sexiness but remains classy and feminine, much like the brand and product itself.

Another key aspect of the website was that it would have an international audience. An interactive store finder area was developed to be easy to use and simple to follow. There are over 20 countries represented, each identifying where a store is present in the respective country.

Taking inspiration from the American burlesque era of performance art and theatrical striptease, we combined different lighting and “show time” elements to increase the seductiveness and mystery of the navigations and reveals. Once every page was designed and mapped out, we worked to make sure our design and ideas came to life, yet were easy to use and fast loading.

The HOTmilk Website has been nominated as a FINALIST at this years BeST Design Awards NZ 2009.

Visit Site: www.hotmilklingerie.co.nz

After months of research and talking to key stakeholders, staff, members and the wider community, we found the essence that connected everyone together was ‘SPIRIT’. This was the common thread that links young and old together with the YMCA, making a global brand reconnect with a local community.

The Result:
To YMCA Tauranga, It’s all about showing your spirit. Ask yourself, when was the last time you showed yours? Most people hold tightly onto theirs, often too shy to release it. Some people let their spirit run wild, and sometimes have to reign it in – and we meet a lot of people who have just never been shown how to find theirs. You also get the occasional person who is saving their spirit for later.

At YMCA Tauranga we work with you to help find your spirit, so you can make the most of your experience and unleash your potential on the world around you.

The Brief:
Intalok homes wanted a refresh of their identity, marketing and sales collateral. They needed to communicate a New Zealand story that captured and communicated the benefits of living in an Intalok home.

Intalok is a company that has built a solid reputation for delivering solid timber homes for homebuyers and developers alike. They have vast experience in building Intalok buildings in a range of climates and conditions. These range from the Cocoa Beach Resort in the Maldives to chalets built on frosty mountainsides. Since the 1970s, Intalok has built over 1600 homes and buildings in 11 different countries.

The Result:
Workshops were undertaken with people who currently owned (and lived in) Intalok homes and also with members of the Intalok staff. The goal was to find out why these people fell in love with solid timber homes.

These workshops were invaluable, and through them and our internal brainstorms we were able to start to craft a brand story. The first key idea was that an Intalok is a home (not a house), a place where real people live and raise their families. This was the opposite of the competitors positioning, so gave us a real point of difference. The second was that an Intalok is a natural place to live, inside and out. For us to start to tell the Intalok story, we then creatively used the brand essence of imagination across all communication.

The Intalok brand has been trusted for over 30 years, so the logo needed to be an evolution rather than a complete redesign, and this consideration helped us shape the unique look and feel. Once our story was set, it drove the design. Imagination was used to represent the link between the Intalok homes and the New Zealand grown Radiata Pine trees they are made out of. This idea was consistently used across a host of design aspects. The simple ‘tree-housed-in-a-home-backbone-graphic’ was used as a device to step you through the story. It also graphically represented our idea that the ‘backbone’ of an Intalok is the natural attributes they possess. We developed the backbone graphic into a seamless pattern used throughout all material.

To communicate key benefits we always aimed to trigger the reader to “imagine” what it would be like if they actually lived in an Intalok. This was done by a combination of comparing an Intalok homes properties versus a regular GIB-walled home, and by graphically illustrating the positive benefits that make an Intalok a standout performer. All of the content was crafted to align with our brand story and further consolidate our message.

To further push the idea of imagination, we created a photography series to complement these graphic devices. Solid timber homes are made out of living, breathing natural material, so we wanted to represent the host of attributes that the original trees pass on to the Intalok home.

We shot on location at actual Intalok homes that were located locally. By fusing these raw images with the four key benefits of our story, we created four easy to comprehend surreal images that capture the similarities between the natural material and the finished product.

The Brief:

To create a premium New Zealand Spring Water brand that is distributed alongside fine wines. The product is to be sold into fine dining establishments including restaurants, cafes and hotels in New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom and Europe.

The Result:

There were a few predetermined factors that we had to consider. First was that the bottle and closure styles were both already chosen. The second was a very short timeline to pull it all off and thirdly we had to visually create a clear distinction between still and sparkling water.

The source of the bottled water is the Blue Spring, which lies near Putaruru. The Blue Spring is aptly named, but it didn’t even come close to representing the intense blue and green hues that are experienced first hand at the Blue Spring. The whole area is protected, very picturesque and the epitome of purity. We knew that if we could re-create the preciousness of the area within the brand, we could tell the true and compelling story of where the water comes from.

Precious became our brand essence, and everything we created had to align with this. The name we settled on is named after the nearby Waihou River, which literally means “new water”. We added “Te” to mean “the”, and “reserve” to align with the fine wine market. The Waihou River feeds directly into the Blue Spring via deep underground aquifers. We shot a series of brand images on location as full colour panoramic shots to show the amazing qualities of the water.

The brand logo was developed through combining very refined typography with a hand drawn illustration. The nearby town of Putaruru means home of the owl, and the hand drawn illustration depicts the owl overlooking the pristine Blue Spring, protecting the area. In the background you can see where the water began its journey many years ago – as rain hitting the Mamaku Ranges. The whole treatment of the design throughout was very simple, clean and precious – like the water itself.

To educate customers on the journey the water continually embarks on, (and the range of products available) we developed a set of marketing collateral which included: stationery, a menu inspired product brochure, a precious brand book and a specifically designed folder to house the material. Rain hits the Mamaku Ranges and then travels for years underground to its release at the Blue Spring. We needed to illustrate how Te Waihou carries on the journey, how they retain the preciousness all the way through in the way they care for and bottle the water.

Aquasplash’s state-of-the-art bottling plant is located at the source, giving added credibility to their role as protector of the area and the water.

We had to isolate viable avenues of distribution in order to penetrate the international market. We targeted wine distributors and positioned Te Waihou as a premium drinking water, allowing it to be sold alongside fine wines to hotels, restaurants and cafes. Reaction and feedback has been 100% positive and the result has been an immediate acceptance into the New Zealand market through the premium Wine Distributor Eurowine. There are also several international enquiries that are currently going through the process of market validation to export and numerous direct enquiries from the Te Waihou website.

Visit: www.tewaihouwater.co.nz

The Brief:
Cook Islands News came to us looking for a refresh of their identity and a complete redesign of the layout and general design of their daily Newspaper.

The national daily newspaper of the Cook Islands is the country’s primary source of local news: relevant, factual and honest journalism with topics relevant to the people it caters for. These people include a combination of local readers (14,000), and visitors (5000 at any one time) to the Cook Islands. We developed an extensive brand strategy based on our communications and correspondence with the Newspaper’s managing editor, to discover where and how far we were going to take the new brand.

Our idea:
A true reflection of the People, Culture, Lifestyle and Islands; as solid as the islands we stand for.

The Cook Islands comprises of a large group of 15 islands with an assortment of media and publications. Cook Islands News prides itself on being accurate, honest and trustworthy, and on being a real voice for the people. They were a true reflection of the People, Culture, Lifestyle and Islands, but they were still feisty and uncompromising in their approach. With this all in mind, we set about implementing a design scheme to reflect this.

The Cook Islands, like all Pacific nations and cultures, has a rich history of traditional motifs, patterns and stories which are woven into the fibre and being of the whole community. We met with local master carver Mike Tavioni, an authoritative figure respected on the islands for his knowledge of Cook Islands art, culture and design. He brought us up to speed on the many different designs and also what was culturally sensitive or inappropriate. He encouraged us and gave his blessing to incorporate these traditional designs into our overall design.

To represent the People we used a variation of the pattern “Ni’ o Mango”, which symbolises strength, cunning, fearlessness, endurance and aggression. To represent Culture ‘Tikitiki Tangata’ was used. It symbolises the people of the Cook Islands united together through language, beliefs, religion and history. To convey the beauty of the Cook Islands lifestyle, the pattern ‘Ngaru’ was used. Traditionally it represents strength and peace. ‘Manu Tai’ symbolises safe journeys, bringing the Cook Islands together as one, and we used this to represent the Islands themselves.

A combination of these elements was crafted together into the final identity and rolled out across all the stationery and signage. We then redesigned the layout of every section – from the hierarchy of fonts, to the point size, kerning and leading of the body copy, right down to the weather icons. The result was that the entire look and feel of the newspaper came together into a bold new identity.

A special challenge of the exercise was to engage key staff (from a total of 19) in the process of redesign and to implement the new scheme without disrupting daily/nightly production of the newspaper. This required a parallel set-up, carefully timed cutover from old software (Pagemaker) to Creative Suite, introduction of a standard sixth column, new typography and new templates. To achieve this, we sent two designers to work on site with the client for several weeks.