Bags of ideas for life

Westford Mill Bags of ideas for life

Market-leading eco-bag and accessory brand, Westford Mill, commissioned Absolute to art direct, design, and produce their new 2018 brochures. Deliverables included a full lifestyle photography shoot and translation of the final brochure into five additional languages.

Sectors

  • Consumer
  • Business

Service

Deliverables

  • Brand Campaign
  • Studio Photography
Westford Mill tone of voice established through copywriting

The Idea

The Westford Mill range has vastly diversified over the years. Starting out by offering big value ‘Bags for Life’, they now retail products for home, beauty and everything in between.

Based on the versatility of their products our ‘Bags of Ideas for Life’ concept was born. Using a ‘for this’ and ‘for that’ tone of voice, we categorised the different Westford Mill ranges, with the intention of helping customers easily select the products relevant for their brand and decoration needs.

Dream home design. For living
A toast to beautiful bags! For bottles and gifts
For fairer trade. For stronger communities. For sustainable development. For greener farming. For environmentally friendly materials. For reduced carbon emissions. For improved workers' rights. For the planet. For everyone. Forever.

The Delivery

30 days, 60 products, hundreds of SKUs encapsulated in one 68-page brochure. Timings included planning and executing a 1-day photo shoot with three models, a stylist, hair and makeup artist; alongside a multitude of bags in our in-house photography studio.

Westford Mill’s identity had an honest, natural feel, focused predominately on their products. To enhance and build upon this established style we introduced a warm pastel colour pallet to sit perfectly alongside the freshly shot lifestyle images.  Once the UK version was complete, it was closely followed by the German, French, Spanish, Italian and Polish versions.

A spread from the Westford Mill product brochure
A spread from the Westford Mill product brochure

The Results

The updated photography, art direction and tone of voice worked together beautifully to communicate the many uses for the products, whilst maintaining the brand essence already recognised within the industry. Since the launch of the campaign the brochure has also been well received across their customer base.

Cover and spread from the Westford Mill brochure
Double page spread and product spread from Westford Mill brochure

Having produced our brochures in-house for a number of years, we decided we needed a fresh approach to our creative direction.

We appointed ABSOLUTE to bring a new lease of life to the Westford Mill brochure and we were delighted with the results. The team developed an enhanced, visual identity and tone of voice, which has invigorated the brand for 2018.

Roger McHugh - Managing Director, Beechfield Brands