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:
As part of the redesign we also completely overhauled the Park Avenue Bank site. We wanted to keep it simple, clean, and most of all easy to navigate.
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.
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.
