Wolf Craft 2020 in Review

BIG THANKS
To all our new friends, early supporters, clients, and collaborators!

They say it takes a village to raise a child. We say it also takes a village to raise a business. And while there are no apt idioms about starting a business during a pandemic, we look back on 2020 feeling so grateful for the kindness and support from the folks we’re lucky to call our community.

In the midst of the first lock down in March, Nora started a project that had been brewing in the back of her mind for a while. She’s been running her own PR firm, Wolf PR, for 10 years but has always wanted to work with companies and individuals for whom retainer PR services were not necessarily a good fit. So she partnered with long time friend and collaborator, Kirsten, and Wolf Craft was born.

2020 was a whirlwind, but we’re so thankful to our friends who helped us with last-minute copy editing as we got our website up and running, our clients who have inspired us and ultimately helped us refine our services to make them useful for small businesses, new partners who have helped us promote our work, and all of our new followers and newsletter subscribers, it’s been so fun to connect with people from around the country and world.

We took a moment to reflect on the work we did in 2020, with established design industry businesses, creative entrepreneurs, AND other PR firms too!

Research & Reporting

We do research and reporting projects for established businesses who need a fresh set of PR-tuned eyes to guide both short-term and long-term strategy around new product launches, company pivots, collaborations, and brand storytelling. These tailored reports are used to guide content creation, thought leadership development, media outreach, and PR overall strategy.

Hygge & West - home goods and pattern company

This company, can we just say WOW! The amount of interesting new work they’ve managed to put out is intimidating! Founded by Aimee Lagos and Christiana Coop, Hygge & West have quietly been expanding their focus from just wallpaper to an all around patter-focused home goods company, including bedding and shower curtains, to start.

When Hygge & West reached out to us, they were keen to bring PR outreach in-house. We worked with Aimee and Christina to reframe Hygge & West’s pivot and expansion, create a strategy for Hygge & West to execute their own PR with a clear understanding of the media opportunities available and the assets and stories needed to approach those opportunities, and to understand strategic storytelling tactics to support designer relationships, influencer programming, and increase trade business. Our specific deliverables included:

An extensive audit of peer companies’ storytelling strategies and websites to evaluate the structure they use, how they balance storytelling with sales, how they communicate their trade program, and how they’re telling their story well.
A detailed roadmap for website updates and content creation to guide Hygge & West as they restructure existing assets to better serve their storytelling and brand goals.
A comprehensive blog content strategy document with “best-in-show” examples from peer companies, including specific learnings, blog-wide recommendations for Hygge & West, specific updates and suggestions for individual posts to increase their impact, and a standard operating procedure for all new posts.
A detailed media list or 30+ outlets and opportunities specific to their upcoming projects and launches.

“Wolf Craft was the perfect solution for us. We wanted to start doing our own press outreach and with Wolf Craft's insights and expertise we were able to create strategies together that we could then implement ourselves. We also worked with them prior to starting work on a new website and the peer audit they did has been an invaluable resource and saved us a lot of time (and money). They provided smart, actionable insights that have already had an impact on how we message and create content.”
— Christiana Coop, Hygge & West

Notch - procurement software startup

Notch is a startup and digital platform that streamlines procurement for multi location hospitality and real estate projects. This is the kind of tech company that we want to see more of, it’s forward looking, it’s efficient, it’s founded in working with designers.

Notch’s founder Charlie Miner, who is also the founder of WorkOf an online home for contemporary design, reached out to us prior to launching his new project Notch. We worked with the team to create a strategy for Notch and CEO Charlie Miner’s activity in anticipation of their launch. This extended to long-term content strategy with a focus on creative business thought leadership. Our specific work included:

An extensive audit of peer companies, similar products, and industry thought leaders to evaluate the language they used and provide them with a clear path forward that met their industry’s standards. This included actionable advice and examples on website copy and design, blog content and case study development, and advice about responding to COVID from the perspective of a new software brand and how it helps companies better plan for future agility.
A detailed media list and pitch angles to support Notch’s launch.
Targeted press outreach for the launch.

“Collaborating with Wolf Craft on the launch of my new business, Notch, was transformative. Nora and Kirsten helped me effectively prepare for media outreach campaigns through extensive market research focused on identifying like minded executives, similar businesses and target press outlets. With assistance from Wolf Craft, I was able to refine our brand messaging to clearly and concisely highlight my company's unique value proposition.”
— Charlie Miner, Notch

level - women-led industrial design firm

This industrial design firm is a dream client. They design beautiful, functional work and they have great thoughtful ideas about the future of their studio and work. Also, and notably, level is female-led and six of the eight team members are women. Currently women make up less than 20% of the industrial design workforce and this number gets even smaller for leadership roles. level and their founder Nichole Rouillac are excited to talk about both their traditional industrial design projects AND about how they’ve worked hard to design an office culture that is supportive, collaborative, and embodies thoughtful work/life balance, characteristics so often absent from cut-throat industrial design firms.

Nichole reached out to us for advice on how to better promote and highlight both their industrial design work as well as her role as the female founder of an industrial design studio, who is very intentionally building a ‘non-toxic’ studio culture. We worked with level to develop a comprehensive storytelling and content development strategy to support design partnerships, new initiatives, and thought leadership. Or specific work included:

An extensive audit of peer companies and industry thought leaders to evaluate their storytelling methods, including language, photography, and graphic assets, across platforms, like company blogs, case studies, traditional press, and podcasts. The final report included specific suggestions to guide how level restructures existing assets and creates new ones to better serve larger storytelling and brand goals.
A detailed quarterly content calendar for 2021 focused on strategic updates to level’s website as well as content creation for thought leadership articles, company blog posts, a quarterly newsletter, and bi-anual newspaper. Each content action item included detailed notes on format, theme, and syndication best practices as well as specific industry examples.
Writing and editing services for specific blog posts and newsletter.

“Nora and Kirsten have been an inspiration to work with. Clear and efficient, they provide in-depth research paired with real-life expectations to deliver strategic content mapping that is both manageable and powerful for our brand. Their pointed copywriting brings fresh, current perspectives to dry text. We continually look forward to our next discussion with them.”
— Vicci Baigrie & Nichole Rouillac, level

Kristine Stiphany - architect, urban researcher, and university professor

Kristine is our first academic client! She is an assistant professor of urbanism in the College of Architecture at Texas Tech University. She is also the founder of the Chapa urban lab for civic data development, a multi-disciplinary, multi-year, multi-country initiative funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Chapa partners with community organizations to create civic data sets, interactive maps, and design proposals to guide local action and prevent displacement in informal settlements. Chapa’s aim is to contribute to a broader movement in which community-based data gathering can expand social equity in urban transformation, improving where and how people live in cities.

Kristine’s work is so important and we loved working with her to outline how to tell the story of Chapa -- and all the initiatives and topics it touches -- to a wider audience that is not necessarily well versed in academic lingo within urbanism, architecture, housing, development, and Latin American studies. We worked with Kristine to help her implement more promotion tactics, develop and execute a media strategy, and create a content ecosystem to support her work. Our specific deliverables included:

An extensive audit of selected thought leaders across architecture, planning, technology, community-based initiatives, to evaluate the language they use, their aesthetic choices, the press they’re seeking, and how and where they’re telling their story, with a particular focus on venues outside traditional academic outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
A detailed outline of specific action items like website adjustments, new content creation, and media outreach based on Kristien’s goals and learnings from our peer audit. We organized her “to dos” into “small”, “medium”, and “large” time commitment categories and identified top priorities for maximum impact.
A detailed media list or 30+ outlets and opportunities -- including example articles -- specific to Kristine’s work and research.

Read more about our research and reporting services.

PR firm support

Custom influencer list

Sometimes building a proper media list can take DAYS. Now imagine if you’re a PR firm with limited bandwidth and personnel and your client wants to see a fresh, new influencer list. AND they want prior examples of how these influencers worked with other similar brands. This is the exact story of one of our favorite PR firms/friends.

We were hired to build an up-to-date client-specific one-time influencer list for this PR firm and their client. We created a detailed list with contact information, examples of past engagement types, and a visual document showing what those posts looked like to show to their client. We’re proud to have turned this list around in one week saving this firm a lot of time.

Affiliate links and gift guide seminar

In early 2020 almost none of our sister company Wolf PR’s clients had an affiliate link program set up. Enter the media and publishing crisis brought on by COVID and the international shutdowns it necessitated. Now all of Wolf PR’s clients have an affiliate program. As they say, times are changing.

Nora was hired by a PR firm to deliver a two hour seminar on affiliate links for PR- and how to advise clients on them, pitching holiday gift guides, and how to use affiliate links programs when pitching gift guides. She drew on best practices from her experience running Wolf PR and successfully pitching holiday gift guides for 10+ years. The questions team members asked during the seminar were really good and Nora was excited to share her knowledge with the whole team.

If you’re a PR firm looking for custom media or influencer lists or
an in-house training send us and email- hello@wolf-craft.com

Guides & Courses

How to Pitch for Gift Guides - self-guided online course

Every year Nora’s PR firm, Wolf PR, sets the goal to get more gift guide features than last year. It's a huge product placement opportunity for their clients, the amount of pages, both digital and physical, dedicated to product increase tenfold. One year Wolf PR got so many gift guide placements, one of their clients pulled their giftable products apart from their furniture line and started a whole new website! All this to say, gift guide placements make a big bottom line difference.

Holiday gift guides are such a stellar PR opportunity and Nora’s spent over a decade helping her retainer clients get featured in these gift guides. However, we were surprised to learn that most holiday gift guide advice available online was very surface level and didn’t go in-depth at all. That's why we decided to put together this very niche course. We worked hard to build a course that helps makers and small business pitch to be featured in holiday gift guides. You’ll learn the things that Nora does every year to get her clients tons of press placements to support their holiday sales goals.

We finally took all of Nora’s knowledge and put into the course she wished someone had made ten years ago when she was starting out. The tips in this guide, like all our work, are useful and actionable, and always abide by our no-fluff policy. We think it's useful for designers, brands, and other PR professionals looking to deepen this skill.

Learn more about How to Pitch for Gift Guides.

If you don’t know if you are quite ready for the full course,
watch our *free* workshop all about how to increase brand awareness with holiday gift guide press

Photography for Media Outreach - three PDF guides

Question- What is one key thing that small brands, design companies, and independent makers can do now to help get more press for their work?

Answer- Take great, industry-standard photos.

Question- But what *are* the standards for great, media quality photography?

This very common questions are why we created three PDF guides to help designers, brands, and makers understand what images work best for press outreach. The guides include in-depth breakdowns of the types of images used in the media and how to create them.

Get our Photography for Media Outreach guides.

One-on-One Consulting

In many ways Wolf Craft grew out of one-on-one consulting. After running Wolf PR for 10+ years Nora has a lot of contacts in the design industry, many of whom are smaller design businesses and creative entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily have the budget, production capacity, or assets needed to hire a full time PR firm on retainer. People started reaching out to Nora looking for individual coaching calls, which she’s been doing for almost a year now with business owners working in interior design, photography, lighting design, food and beverage, jewelry design, textiles, and more.

Our one-on-one consulting teaches you to do your own PR research, pitching, and asset development. We meet our clients where they’re at in their business to help them understand the best ways to bring their work media attention.

Learn more about one-on-one consulting with Nora Wolf.

Newsletter

Although at the end of this post, our free bi-weekly newsletter is one of our 2020 creations that we’re most proud of and that we’ve worked really hard on! Launched in August 2020, we started the Wolf Craft newsletter to help our audience understand how PR works, beyond the tired advice of “build relationships with editors!” (I mean, HOW exactly do you do that?!). Adhering to our hardline “no-fluff” policy, we share useful media outreach tips, behind the scenes press strategy, case studies, and PR resources. So far we’ve done deep dives into editor research, creating a press page, identifying what to edit in Photoshop, reading media with like a publicist, and more! We also love sharing the amazing press features our clients have been getting in the newsletter.

The newsletter has also been a really rewarding way to connect with our audience. Our *very friendly* welcome email asks readers to share a bit about their work and PR struggles. We always respond with a specific suggestion. You can see some of those emails and our advice in our post The best PR advice we gave new subscribers in 2020.

“This is so informative. It’s really valuable.”

“Seems like you’re giving away a lot for free. It’s not a teaser, it’s a roadmap.”