The Problem:

The Box Fort team was an internal Amazon vendor but they didn’t have much visibility within the company. Our web presence was fairly embarrassing and customers who did bring us projects were looking for very simple/limited scope work.

At the beginning of each project, the client would ask for a video, an animation or a logo treatment and they would receive a written SOW and a timeline with no indication of what the final deliverable might look like. 

The client asks for something specific and we spit it out. I call it a vending machine style of business and it doesn’t yield good work or a happy team.

Introducing Creative Treatments:

I firmly believe that the best work comes from collaboration with the client. As design professionals, we have valuable insight to bring to the table and if we are not sharing it, the work suffers.

 The first thing I implemented was the use of creative treatments. Every project, big or small would get a visual treatment giving the client a clear idea of the design direction for the piece. Small projects would get a mood board with relevant examples. Larger projects would get a more custom treatment often with recommendations to make the project more successful.

Impact:

The Customers reactions were overwhelmingly positive. In the first year the team was utilizing creative treatments to influence the deliverables, almost 75% of the treatments  were approved with no change to the proposed vision.

I got some initial pushback from the team about the extra effort, but once they saw how we could move the creative needle, they were fully on-board.

Revamping the Website:

I couldn’t get leadership to spring for a dev partner to revamp our web presence so I got really scrappy and taught myself enough coding to do it on my own.

Impact:

In addition to making us seem more like a legitimate business, the website also gave us an easy location to send people with enquiries about our offerings. This saved the producers countless hours fielding questions.

Attracting new Business:

My next strategy for improving the quality of our partnerships was building out a business development process. I put together a team to start looking for new opportunities. Then I built out a pitch deck showing off our capabilities and began meeting with leaders from across Amazon.

Impact:

We didn’t immediately get work from every pitch, but the effort significantly improved our visibility. We got a number of referrals and often people I had pitched to in the past would remember us and reach out for a later project.

The most significant improvement was that the kind of work we started receiving was less prescriptive and more open ended. We were beginning to be viewed as creative partners not a vending machine.