Inspiring Customers Through a Sustainability Report
Grand & Toy came to us wanting a sustainability report prepared – one highlighting their corporate achievements and their culture while focusing on three platforms – People, Prosperity and Planet. They also wanted to showcase their successes in other areas like social activities and supplier diversity. The ultimate goal was to position Grand & Toy as a partner that would help small business customers meet their own sustainability goals.
1. The Challenge
The challenge facing our creative team was a big one: previous years’ editions of Grand & Toy’s sustainability reports had been significantly longer in length (40 plus pages). Condensing it down to a mere eight pages meant the writing and design would need to work in tandem to achieve these results.
Preparing a report that would present more as a sell sheet or brochure meant fewer opportunities to include supportive information or detailed explanations. At the same time, the report’s focus had to remain firmly on the company’s UVP (unique value proposition) and how it benefitted their customers. Throughout the entire report, the theme needed to be both inspiring and uplifting.
2. THE SOLUTION
Concise, constructive writing combined with high impact images and infographics were needed to tell the visual story. Short, snappy bite-sized information was key as was the integration of core stats and callouts. Further adding to the report’s impact was an interactive element where the digital version included live links, essentially guiding customers to specific pages on the Grand & Toy site where additional information could be found.
From a design perspective, a clean, bold look was critical to ensuring the report was on brand and conveyed the right messaging. There was plenty of content so design was able to work with existing assets to create infographics that could then be incorporated throughout the piece, not only to help tell the visual story but also to help pull the pieces together.
Using the parent brand as a foundation, our design team used colours, typestyles and size differentials to create a more dynamic piece. The content was broken up into smaller, more easily read bits of information which further contributed to clearer messaging and hierarchy. The infinity symbol was used across the report’s pages to signify movement (progress). Variations of the symbol itself – swoops, swerves and curves – were also incorporated to help tie the content together.
3. THE RESULT
The end result was a focused, tightly-packaged report that effectively showcased Grand & Toy’s sustainability achievements over the past year. Designed for both digital and print consumption, the report highlighted customized solutions that showed small businesses how working with Grand & Toy could be of significant benefit to them. Providing insights into Grand & Toy’s commitment to community engagement, workforce diversity and overall social betterment further contributed to the report’s inspiring and motivating message.