Cotton has been around since 4500 BC.
It was high time to update its sales materials.
Cotton is such a universally beloved fabric, you would think it sells itself. But even this textile superstar relies on a posse of promoters—industry experts who travel the world, making sure manufacturers and retailers understand why the fabric is so popular. The people at Cotton Inc. (the folks behind “The Fabric of Our Lives”) asked us to enhance their existing sales materials by making them digitally dance.
THE SITUATION
When industry trade group Cotton, Inc., approached us, they already had a handsome printed sales kit, featuring a consistent look, compelling photography and lots of good copy and data. The kit made a compelling case that cotton’s longstanding popularity is perpetually refreshed by the industry with regular innovations in textile technology. Our client had no intention of abandoning their hard-working printed sales kit. (We heartily endorsed their enthusiasm for the power of printed sales materials.) But they also wanted to give their sales team a digital presentation of the kit—one that expressed the case on an iPad (for example), employing animated graphics and other digital enhancements. We hastened to assure the cotton team that they had come to the right place. Then we set about proving it.
THE SOLUTION
Using existing photography, copy, data and design motifs, our team constructed a new version of the printed package, taking care to carry forward design ideas that needed no improvement, while judiciously adding new flair and freshness. We took static graphs and animated them, so that when a presenter swiped the screen to move to a new page, the action would trigger the graph on that page to unfurl its data in an eye-catching way. Navigation needed no explanation, as the method of moving through the document was blissfully intuitive.
THE OUTCOME
Cotton, Inc.’s sales team—which works in markets and at trade shows around the world—reports that they love the new way of making the case for cotton. The marketing department has asked Red Letter to expand the digital sales tool with further content, a project that will continue until every part of the cotton story is contained within this one easy-to-use presentation.
