On the Wall Street of today, cold hard cash is an increasingly rare commodity. With the 2009 bonus season ushering in a new era of stock-only bonuses, bankers are struggling to maintain their cash intensive lifestyle. Smith & Wollensky is ahead of the curve in this regard, and will now be accepting NYSE and NASDAQ stock certificates as payments (as you can clearly see from this enormous NYT print ad). Really, they are.
Another year, another set of cool new CW-X products. These print executions will be complimented with digital (of course), and continue on our latest product-centric theme, which has been really well received. Turns out, runners get pretty excited by call-outs.
Everybody has a germaphobe in their life. That certain somebody who’s constantly washing their hands, is repulsed by crowds and will only touch doorhandles with their elbow. The Ultimate Hand Scanner is a friendly way to reinforce this paranoia, and possibly make it worse. Log on and in just a few minutes you can have a friend or loved one believing that 1) their computer monitor actually scanned their hand and 2) that they are completely covered in microbes. Luckily for them, there’s Gold Bond Ultimate Hand Sanitizer, Moisturizer - the world’s first hand sanitizer and moisturizer. It won’t dry out your hands, so they can reapply 20 times a day if necessary. See the scanner in action here.
The Three Walrus Moon T-Shirt, the one thing that everyone wants for Christmas (whether they know it or not).
One of the biggest casualties of the financial crisis has to be the expense account meal. With the financial industry in turmoil, and unemployment higher than it’s been in decades, it’s easy to understand why those who still have their jobs are hesitant to appear brazen with the corporate card. Upscale steakhouse Maloney & Porcelli sits at 50th and Park, in the heart of expense account country, footsteps away from the likes of Citigroup, Blackrock and Morgan Stanley, and is working hard to help. Their clientele has always considered them a top spot to enjoy a 24 inch steak but with CFOs keeping tabs on every cent, it takes guts to turn in a receipt from a huge meal.
Enter the Maloney & Porcelli expense report generator (expenseasteak.com), a website that makes it easy to turn a decadent meal into a responsible expense. Simply enter the cost of a meal, and the generator will create a printable sheet of expense report-friendly receipts (office supplies, business how-to books and taxis) exactly totaling the amount of the meal. See it here.
And that’s not all we’re doing to help. Maloney & Porcelli is also famous for basketball sized pork shanks that are nearly impossible to finish. This poses its own unique set of problems since coming back to the office with a doggie bag emblazoned with a Maloney & Porcelli logo might raise a few eyebrows. Taking a cue from luxury boutiques who began offering their customers plain white shopping bags earlier this year, M&P’s doggie bags are utilizing a unique form of camouflage - the logos of other, less pricey restaurants. That way, as a small paragraph on the back of the bags reads, a customer will be “free to roam wherever you please, completely invisible to the watchful eyes of the etiquette police.”
Outside the restaurant, if you happen to be passing by - we’ve provided a long list of messages that will help people remember that there’s nothing like a good steak, even if times are tough.
The Park Avenue Bank is a local bank in New York City with branches in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They have an entrepreneurial spirit that pervades everything they do and they’ve made a mission out of helping small businesses get a leg up. While this has always been part of their DNA, they’ve never really said much about it. 2009 has turned into a huge opportunity to win over new customers as the image of big banks has grown more and more tarnished. We were tasked with helping them update their image and messaging to better emphasize their small business expertise. In the end, we updated everything - signs, posters, brochures, their site. Steering away from your typical, generic looking stock photography, we wanted to give them something completely unique - and that something came in the form of illustrations. Take a look:
The Park Avenue Bank is there to help small businesses in everything they do. To help reinforce this fact, we wanted to create something that really, truly is helpful. Introducing the Park Avenue Bank Small Business HQ. This online resource for small business owners features constantly updated content with the sole purpose of helping small business owners better deal with the unique complexities of owning a business. The news section features articles of relevance to small business owners (for instance, how an SBA loan works), and a news aggregator collects articles of interest from all over the web. The Entrepreneur’s Corner is for those who are just getting their business off the ground and features tips on everything from writing a business plan to negotiating a lease. The bank’s existing clients aren’t forgotten here either, we’ve put in a section devoted entirely to them with interviews and profiles. Hopefully we can drum up some business for them along the way. See it here.
The Park Avenue Bank really cares about its customers. They’ll do everything they can to help you get a loan, including finding you a different lender if they can’t do the deal. Call them, and somebody will get back to you – even if it’s past banking hours. You can even call the Park Avenue Bank and ask to talk to the CEO and they’ll connect you. This couldn’t be more different than the type of treatment that comes from a “big bank”. In fact, if you treated pretty much any other living creature the way a big bank treats people, you’d kill it. To bring this point to life, we enlisted the help of man’s favorite houseplant: the fern (nope, it’s not the ficus). These ferns were delivered to potential Park Avenue Bank customers, complete with two sets of care instructions: an informative, touchy feel-y one from the Park Avenue Bank, and a dispassionate, bureaucratic one from a “big bank.”
CW-X’s patented Stabilyx tights don’t just lend extra support to the knees, calves and thighs, they also provide targeted support to the body’s core (the abs and lower back). In fact they’re so supportive that they can EVEN give phenomenal support to the least supported creatures on earth – jellyfish. Don’t believe us? Try it yourself with the CW-X Invertebrate Slingshot here.
To highlight the amazing supportive powers of CW-X’s Stabilyx tights, we compared them to something that has pretty much no supportive powers.
Our first iphone app, the Peek-O-Matic, is now available for download on the itunes store! Get yours today!
Update: Gizmodo did a pretty amazing review of the app.
CW-X Ventilator tights have mesh venting panels so you can wear them in hot weather. The idea of wearing tights in the heat is hard to get your head around, so we chose the most extreme situation imaginable to demonstrate how efficient these tights are at keeping you cool. We blew a lot of things up making this banner - something we all found quite enjoyable. Easter eggs are sprinkled throughout to reward further exploration (try clicking more than once on any of the callouts). See it here.
CW-X’s anatomically engineered conditioning wear (tights, tops, bras etc.) can help all kinds of athletes perform better. People use their gear for everything from training, to recovery, to insulation. This is a great thing, but it presents some issues when it comes to making an intuitive and usable site because every single customer prioritizes features differently. Some care most about a specific type of support, some care most about which conditions a product is suitable for, and others are most focused on a specific activity. With the new site, instead of steering visitors through a fixed path to learn about the products, we decided to give them more flexibility. Visitors can choose to explore products by support, by activity, and by product line or they can simply leave the work to the automated tight and bra selectors. Just plug in your criteria and out comes the perfect choice. There are also tons of 360 degree product renderings, muscle drawings, charts and graphs to satisfy anyone who really wants to delve into the nuts and bolts of how this stuff really works. Check it out at: www.cw-x.com
Return Path is the world’s leading email deliverability company. What the heck is email deliverability? That’s the problem. In fact, even people in the business of email deliverability have trouble explaining it. Return Path needed a way to help new and potential customers get up to speed on exactly what goes into getting an email safely from point a to point b (it’s kind of scary), and how Return Path fits into the mix. In the end we decided to go with books rather than anything digital on this one. Since almost all of Return Path’s sales and support are done over the phone or the web, we thought it might be nice to actually be in the room with their customers for once.
Very Short List, the world’s greatest daily email, now has a food and a kids edition. These email blasts continue to utilize the magic of info-graphics to lure subscribers.
Behold, the 2008 Walrus Holiday Tchotchke! It’s stylish, environmentally friendly, and honest.
Many causes have a color: breast cancer has pink, AIDS has red, and though not everyone knows it, hunger awareness has orange. Every December, the Food Bank for New York City encourages New York to “Go Orange” to help raise awareness. This year the Empire State Building, the Woolworth Building and Lincoln Center turned their lights orange, the Food Bank rang the opening bell for the Nasdaq (and brought us along too, which was really awesome), and they’re plastering the city with posters, bus sides and taxi tops that we created to help get the word out.
Return Path, the world’s greatest email deliverability company (and a Walrus client), has made a tradition of sending a Thanksgiving “thank you” to all their friends and clients. We’ve done it the past two years, and this year’s edition features some hilarious deliverability humor.
