Tell your brand story

Your sustainability efforts can tell a very powerful story. When communicated in the right way, it can help you win your customers attention and gain their trust. How you tell your sustainability story totally depends on what you’ve already decided your brand values are, as well as who your customer is, and what makes them tick. Let’s hear from some brands and experts, themselves, about what sustainability messages resonate with their customers, and what marketing tips and tricks have helped them build their brand story.

We live in a marketing driven society. And it doesn’t matter how good your product is, or how sustainable it is, how beautiful it is, and how much better you are than the next person. If you don’t know how to market your products, or it’s not marketed well, then you’re going to get lost. I think it’s about looking at what your audience is interested in, and then working out how to speak to them.

To stand up and be noticed, I feel that you need two primary elements. Now the first one, of course, is your design. Because, obviously, that’s the first thing that people will see. So it’s not called Fashion Design for nothing. But there are other elements that are equally important. So one’s the story behind your design. And young designers tend to have that in abundance. So that’s vital, that the two things go hand in hand. That there is a mythical, exciting story behind the clothes that you do. This is why, to a certain extent, when you teach designers, you teach them so much to really cherish their references.

To be intelligent about the way that they design, to be able to convey what the thinking is behind the design. So our customers, they love all our stories, really. Whether it’s a recycled water bottle, or these were tyres on the bottom of the sea, and now it’s a cool bag, or leather that doesn’t have chrome. Organic, all costly organic things, especially we have a lot of moms around here, respond very positively to that. It’s easy to resonate one thing and keep your message quite tight. For us we never use sustainability as a marketing tool, or selling tool, or business opportunity. It was always just the fact that we thought a business should be sustainable.

A product should be sustainable, design should be sustainable. And it was very much an inherent value or a backbone within the business. Naturally, along the way, you talk to people, and the media will come to you, or people will come to you. And they will hone in on that to sell an article because it’s exciting and interesting. So, we live and work in a very commercial environment. So it has to– it’s about price, it’s about delivery, it’s about quality, and that’s the most important thing. That’s paramount in our clients’ minds is that you have to tick all those boxes. And on the back of that, we then add ethics and sustainability.

And if we can compete in the same market as others who aren’t perhaps quite as sustainable, or don’t have quite the same outlook as we do, but we can still win work, then it’s a good thing. So we bring a little extra to the table, but we still have to compete in the commercial market. Sustainability is incredibly interesting because it’s incredibly complex. It talks about technique, it talks about innovation, it talks about crafts, it talks about environment, it talks about people, politics.

Whether you’re passionate about sustainability, or whether you have government pressure to get involved, or whether it’s, everybody’s doing it you want to jump on board, whatever the reasons is, the benefits are that your customers have doubled the retail value. They feel very good engaging with the stories.

I think it’s really important to have your line sheet and images of your product completely professionally done. We do judge things very quickly, based on image and if you get it wrong, you just might miss that opportunity.