We were floored

When we first started working with Milliken Floor Coverings in 2017, the brand was undergoing an initiative to bring more fashion-forward products to market. And fast! To achieve results, it was important for us to develop a strong relationship with all of the teammates. We spent days with the team trying to understand both their internal and external challenges. We started to grasp the challenges they were facing, and it was a familiar one to us.

Manufacturing a product takes a smart and talented group of engineers and scientists. So important is the manufacturing process to the internal staff that the process-driven mindset flows over and sometimes smothers the creative side of marketing. This is precisely what was happening at Milliken. Their material needed that emotional component in order to connect to their buyers. All aspects of the process needed to be refined and recreated in order to start laying the foundation for this connection to happen. This meant rethinking everything.

The mindset needed to transform from “we are creating an architectural folder and brochure” to “what story do we want to tell?” To start, we created what we call an ICP aka an Inspiration Concept Presentation. This live document starts with the inspiration for the product and is slowly updated as the process moves forward. We used this ICP to keep everyone in the manufacturing process up to speed and also built concepts off of it from the agency side.

The next hurdle was to move away from the idea that the purpose of a photoshoot was only for creating folder and brochure imagery. Instead, we started to encourage the belief that we needed a photoshoot to produce assets for all tactics across the board. This meant social media, video, photography, behind the scenes, interviews and more.

Lastly, we created a launch document outlining all of the tactics that we still refer to today. This helped to determine and implement the depth and needed impact of the launch. Since then, we have added unique tactics such as homepage takeovers, interactive PDFs, representative training and 3D roomscenes.

As a result, Milliken Floor Coverings has increased the connectivity of product launches to specifiers and the time it takes to launch a product has been reduced by one third.

Leveraged Creative:
• Strategic planning
• Executive creative direction
• Account supervision
• Art direction
• Copywriting
• Graphic design
• Programming
• 3D rendering
• Photography
• Videography
• Editing

Milliken & Company is an American industrial manufacturer that has been in business since 1865. With corporate headquarters located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the company is active across a breadth of disciplines including chemical, textiles, floor coverings, healthcare.