Sustainable Harvest: Fresh Brewed Marketing
A crowd staring intently at a projected presentation, detailing a company’s business model, while leafing through slick brochures might not seem an unusual scenario. In fact, you very well may have done just that this morning.
But make that crowd a group of Nicaraguan coffee growers watching a Keynote presentation projected on the side of a church, while flipping through marketing materials made with Pages, and you have something highly unusual, except if you’re David Griswold, founder of Sustainable Harvest.
“We’ll show these presentations in the field,” Griswold says at his environmentally friendly building, the Ecotrust Natural Capital Center, in Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District. “We’ll take a digital projector, show the presentation anywhere, on a wall, in a church, etc. The farmers think it’s great. We explain our relationship business model, and they see how it jives with how they do business. I also bring a DVD of World Cup soccer highlights to wrap up the presentations with after the Keynote. They love it! These presentations become community events.”
Sustainable Harvest is one of North America’s leading importers of fair trade organic coffee, sourcing from small-scale cooperatives that represent 100,000 growers in 12 countries.
Though the company is 11 years old (with David’s specialty coffee experience stretching back to 1989), the Fair Trade coffee industry is highly competitive and hard to break into. But Apple products and applications such as Keynote and Pages give Sustainable Harvest the edge they need to succeed in the unique niche they have carved out for themselves.
Unlocking opportunity with Keynote
Keynote is easy-to-use software that enables anyone and everyone to create cinema-quality presentations with dramatic slide transitions, builds, and text animations. Think of it as corporate slideshows gone Mac. Its ease-of-use also means that anyone can design their own dynamic presentations in no time flat, complete with cinematic transitions, animation effects, and 3D charts. Keynote also features advanced image editing that, with iPhoto-ease, lets you turn any photograph or graphic into a stunning visual experience.
“I did a Keynote as president of the Specialty Coffees of America a couple of years ago in front of 3,000 people,” Griswold recalls. “Afterward, someone from a huge, well-known coffee company asked, ‘How did you do that?’ Usually, if I tell people I’m giving a presentation, there’s a lot of resistance. I don’t blame them. Most are usually just text with too many gratuitous transitions. Sustainable Harvest focuses on quality photos and presentations, because they represent the quality of our products, with great looking photos that transport people to the other side of the world, the other side of the coffee value chain. It’s such a powerful medium. And when I’m presenting to 3,000 people, I know my Mac will never crash.”
Perk up brochures with Pages
“It’s an easy, powerful way for us to keep fires burning under particular coffees,” Griswold says. “We work with 80 coffee coops, and we — with Pages — have the ability to design and distribute customized marketing materials.”
Sustainable Harvest uses Pages to easily create gorgeous, informative brochures to share with their clients such as Tully’s Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and Allegro Coffee/Whole Foods. They design the brochures, save them as PDFs, then e-mail them as the monthly Quick Harvest Update newsletter. The brochures look beautiful as printouts too, so — based on their customers’ preferences — Sustainable Harvest can also mail them out, often with samples. It’s an innovative publishing tool that combines the best of both worlds: a freeform graphics canvas for simple, precise placement of images and other elements with all of the text handling and document formatting you’d expect to find in a word processor. All David does is pick a template, drop in his photographs, and write. The result is polished collateral that exudes professionalism.
Customize your message: conveniently
The intuitive, drag-and-drop nature of Pages also gives David and Sustainable Harvest the flexibility to respond to the perks and quirks of the coffee industry instantly with slick-looking collateral. This way, Sustainable Harvest can, for instance, comment on a pertinent coffee issue, then pass that information on to their coffee roasters in an engaging, easy-to-read form that they it is easily passed along.
“In our business, there are always huge delays: ships stuck somewhere, storms, political issues…it’s always something,” Griswold laughs. “By keeping our clients up to speed with design agency-quality updates, we make them look good, since they can explain the reasons behind a particular delay to their bosses. It’s so simple: I just take one of my templates, switch out the pictures, add new text, and off it goes.”
Griswold accomplishes all of this in-house, on the fly, without employing additional design resources nor having to learn complicated design programs. All David does is make a selection from Page’s Style menu, where every template has a set of styles preselected to look good in that design, including fonts, sizes, and colors for different elements in his documents. And both Keynote and Pages integrate smoothly with iLife apps such as iPhoto, iTunes, GarageBand and iMovie, so all of your iWork presentations and collateral can boast gorgeous photography, great music and audio, and movies.
“People always ask me how we do it,” Griswold says. “PageMaker? Word? It’s not rocket science, though it looks like it.”
