Why Documenting Everything is Important for Public Relations: A Wolf PR Case Study
A while back, Design Milk published an in-depth feature about Wolf PR’s client, Smilow. The feature, aptly named Deconstruction, is a monthly deep dive into what it takes to bring a design product or collection to life. The designer or brand takes the readers behind the scenes to share their rarely seen product development process. This often includes showcasing different prototypes, process photos and sketches, and factory and production photography for a deeper understanding.
I particularly love Deconstruction because it allows designers and manufacturers to share what actually goes into the products that they are working on. And while the feature may be about the technicalities of design and production, the stories are still told in a way that is interesting for the average layman. Even though I’m not an industrial designer, by reading Deconstruction I’ve gained an appreciation for all the design elements that I wouldn’t even know to think about.
They say the best design is 99% invisible (what a great name for a podcast about design… 😀) and Deconstruction shines a light on those overlooked, invisible parts. For perhaps the first time, we see how many table prototypes a design team had to make before they got to the slim frame profile to hold up the heavy top.
It’s a fantastic venue for sharing niche yet informative content, like the finer points of rigorous ergonomics research with the accompanying photos of trials and failures. In short, it's a place to share the design process where there just are not a lot of places to share it in the current design media. It’s a destination for bigger story telling.
Deconstruction is also only published once a month making it an honor to be selected. Because it’s a rare, it’s also much harder to secure a feature. So how do our clients get ready for PR opportunities like these? By having the right assets for the right stories.
In general we encourage our clients to document everything! Capturing sketches, design briefs, installations, prototyping, manufacturing, helps potential customers understand why your brand, your product stands out among its competition.
While you might think documenting everything is only true for design (and you wouldn’t be wrong, it is especially important in design which is an aesthetics forward industry), you’ll see this strategy pop up for all types of industry.
You see it with Obama and his in-house photographer, Pete Souza, who followed him for the entirety of his presidential career. Souza documented even the most mundane moments, never knowing what might turn into a bigger story. You see it when a fitness guru shares monthly updates on improving their flexibility, perhaps with supporting content that includes trial and error of different tools like straps and yoga blocks that helped them finally get their first split.
Don’t underestimate the small stuff because it can contribute to a larger story that you might not be able to see until you have all of the pieces together.
When you have a lot of strong assets to choose from you also have a lot of stories to tell. In the example of our fitness guru, they can now pitch a story about the ups and downs of becoming more flexible to a fitness blog-- and perhaps even get sponsorship with a yoga block brand. Plus they can use those assets for their newsletter and social media. This begins to splinter into a larger post about asset development and content planning, but hopefully you can start to see how documenting everything can play into a larger content strategy in addition to public relations.
We knew our client Smilow would be a great fit for Deconstruction because of all their archival and process images. Smilow is unique because they have a stunning cache of archival images and advertisements from when the company was in their first iteration back in the mid-century. The current CEO pulls from this deep well of archival materials to use in the development of the current line, all of which are revivals of original mid-century furniture (it helps that the CEO is also the granddaughter of the original designer). This abundance of not only archival images, but also fantastic production photography made them a great candidate for the feature and a great client to work with.
The Smilow team decided the best product to move forward with was their Woven Leather collection. Design Milk notes, “The collection pairs stellar craftsmanship and beautiful details noted from every angle that result in classic pieces to last a lifetime.” You may have heard the expression show, don’t tell when it comes to writing for PR. In the feature, we were able to share many images that supported the claim of stellar craftsmanship and beautiful details. Smilow’s Deconstruction feature had images from the current collection, vintage photography and original sketches from Mel Smilow. They also had a ton of factory and production shots, which in this case were especially important because everything from Smilow is handmade. Because we had these photos, we were able to hammer home the handmade story that is so integral to the Smilow story.
If you are finding this post helpful we think you’ll get a lot out of our 5-Day Pitch the Media Mini Course
This isn’t the first time we’ve been able to help our clients secure features in Deconstruction. Back in 2018, we worked with Herman Miller to help introduce their newest office chair, called Cosm. Because the chair uses a brand new, never-before-seen-technology, Studio 7.5, the German design team who designed the chair for Herman Miller, was able to provide us with plenty of development images to help the reader understand how complex and special the auto-tilt technology inside this chair is, including one of my favorite images:
So many elements about this chair are unique: the way the suspension fabric is held onto the chair, the shape of the arms, even how the joints come together. Design Milk wouldn’t have been able to tell those stories without the images to accompany them.
Through a more artistic angle, we also worked with Ghostly International, placing them in Deconstruction with a limited edition artwork created for them by artist Matthew Shilan. Matthew had a lot of process screenshots which helped get realllll nerdy, and a great read for fellow process porn lovers. He was able to get into the details of how the artwork literally comes together. Reading this Deconstuction was was like visiting an artist in their studio.
If you want to tell these behind the scenes stories, make sure you’re capturing the assets to tell that story visually. Magazines and blogs are big picture books and the better assets you have the better chances for being selected for publication. This is why documenting everything is important for public relations!
