Woodworker taps VFC to rebrand and promote business
To say the Trading Post Depot suffered an identity problem would be like saying suburban homes aren’t made more beautiful with a little farmhouse flair. A homegrown company, the store had evolved organically and any branding and marketing was scattershot at best. VFC had discovered the shop while designing our studio and, after several revealing conversations, realized we could help them as much as they helped us!
Much more than an antique shop—in fact, the owner would prefer not to be known for the eclectic estate items in stock and more for the coveted creations he builds in his impressive workshop—custom farmhouse tables and live edge woodworking is what really separated the Trading Post Depot from similar offerings and they never communicated that effectively.
BRANDING
VFC started by convincing the owner to change the DBA name. Depot wasn’t getting them anything and was creating confusion with search engine optimization. With SEO being a major goal of this campaign, shortening the name to Trading Post and securing the effective, if long, domain PennsylvaniaTradingPost.com was as important to the branding effort as a strong logo and tagline. With the nomenclature set, VFC presented an accessible identity that brought organization and consistency to the marketing effort. Previous efforts had literally employed dozens of brand treatments, fonts and name combinations. Now the brand has a style guide and brand standard that defines every effort. The new identity system now better communicates the customized offering and includes support branding touches that allow the maker to get creative while maintaining consistency.
WEBSITE
The biggest problem the Trading Post was experiencing when they partnered with VFC was awareness. The company was 10+ years-old, situated in a highly visible location but, still lacked a steady stream of business for custom creations. In the simplest terms it was because they lacked a website and, in turn, lacked SEO and local listings. You can’t employ search engine optimization without a web presence and, although several half-hearted attempts had been started over the years, the Trading Post never sat down to organize content and develop a purposeful web presence. VFC helped them think about categories and employ content management features to showcase the offering. On launch, VFC undertook an aggressive search engine optimization and promotional effort for PennsylvaniaTradingPost.com—submitting the site to all major search engines and optimizing local listings in Google, Bing and Yahoo while claiming and repopulating social channels with relevant content and a sustainable plan.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Showcasing live edge tabletops, bars and mantles in their natural environment is as much a challenge as illustrating the variety of custom farmhouse tables offered by the Trading Post. The answer is variety—no two live-edged creations are the same and farmhouse tables are an infinite selection of tops and legs—so VFC undertook multiple location shoots to achieve a voluminous archive used on the web in social media and in collateral.
COLLATERAL
Leveraging the new Trading Post brand to develop a more effective collateral presentation meant creating a revised brochure showcasing the custom offering with revitalized photography and copy content. Organizing the brochure based on the categories defined by the website introduced a logical way to talk about the offering to the target audience and the Trading Post was able to weigh messaging by what was most important or most profitable.
