MERZ APOTHECARY & SMALLFLOWER
BRAND STORY
CLIENT
Merz Apothecary
Smallflower
SERVICES
Pre-Production
Production
Post-Production
A retail store wanted to incorporate the story of their 147-year-old business into their e-commerce site’s content marketing. JV Studios produced a video and handled all the production from start to finish.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
THE CHALLENGE
The marketplace is crowded, and e-commerce is a complicated business, so it is hard for them to compete with Amazon. Many of their products are sold by other retailers, but they believe that more people want to put their money toward businesses with unique stories.
Although they keep the two businesses separate, we were trying to incorporate Merz Apothecary’s story into our content marketing around Smallflower to concisely and compellingly tell our customers that when they order a product, it’s coming from a 147-year-old store in Chicago. We needed to tell that story through video, so they called JV Studios to help with that.
THE PROCESS
We initially had lunch with the Merz team to talk about the store. We scouted the store, experienced it, and spoke to their brother-in-law, who currently runs it. We soaked up the store's essence and worked collaboratively with Greta to figure out what story we’d tell. It took a while, but once we had the direction established, we shot on-site at the store.
Our team brought in our crew and equipment. The only thing we didn’t handle in-house was the voiceover because Greta’s husband is a sound engineer, so they recorded it. The voice talent was Greta’s father-in-law, the CEO and star of the video.
They were great at communicating and organizing. The team met all the deadlines; we didn’t have complaints. JV Studios was very patient and helpful; we never felt pressured or rushed by them.
““
Greta Honold
Merz Apothecary Marketing Manager
THE RESULTS
They were creative and generous collaborators. They had great impulses and intuition and were excellent listeners. Overall, they were absolutely professional in the execution, so it was an outstanding collaboration.
At this point, we don’t have quantitative data to share. We did an awareness video, and we’re starting to use it in a couple of different ways. We haven’t run it as an ad, but we have plans to cut it down into shorter bits that we’ll be able to run.
