Background

Traidcraft is the UK’s fairtrade pioneer, established in 1979 it has been working with producers around the world to combat poverty through trade. It boasts the UK’s largest range of fairtrade products including food, drinks, clothing, jewellery, home furnishings, children’s toys, stationery and cards.

The organisation appointed Cool Blue to develop national awareness of its products in order to increase sales via its online store.

Strategy

The main challenge was to change journalists’ opinion of Traidcraft products which were considered ‘worthy’ but not ‘desirable’ to contemporary readers’ tastes.

We audited the whole product collection and reassessed what would appeal to national journalists and developed a matrix of calendar events, products that suited those events and a segmented media database allowing us to get maximum potential value from each product shot release.

Importantly we also developed a new way of telling Traidcraft’s story to appeal to these journalists focusing on the use of producer case-studies to demonstrate the huge positive impact of the organisation’s work.

Result

The campaign resulted in a whole new era of coverage for Traidcraft with its products consistently appearing in the UK’s leading women’s and lifestyle magazines as well as all of the weekend supplements.

The volume of coverage rose exponentially but more importantly we broke through into market sectors previously untapped by Traidcraft with coverage in titles such as the Sunday Times Style supplement, the Telegraph’s ‘Stella’ magazine, Mail on Sunday’s ‘You’ magazine, Ready Steady Cook, QVC and the PA Newswire.

Traidcraft’s independent analysis of our work revealed a huge return on investment through increased product sales and through a growing reputation amongst leading journalist’s as a leading fairtrade company.