Earth Wood Goods

Web Design and Social Media Marketing for Wood Watches and Sunglasses





Overview


Earth Wood Goods is a brand of wood watches and sunglasses by Resultco, a West Bloomfield-based watch and sunglasses distributor and marketer. Wood watches and sunglasses was not a market that I was aware of before working on this project. There are actually several competing brands of each, and an active market for these products. Even though I don’t wear a watch, I did find some of the wooden watches to look pretty cool, in a semi-formal hipster sort of way.

Since the products were made of wood, I took a “back to the roots” approach to the soft rebranding of Earth. Namely, that meant earthy colors inspired by the forest and lots of natural imagery. I found a nice font, Siara, to mimic the existing logo font, and paired it with an unassuming sans serif called Lato. It’s a nice combo that I’ll keep in mind for later.

 


Audience


This brand was a little out of the ordinary for Resultco because it was a consumer-facing brand. They do most of their business wholesale or with deal sites, so marketing directly to consumers was nearly unheard of.

The audience for wood watches and sunglasses is young; millennial or gen-z; and probably cares about the environment. The first thing I did was suggest that we give back some portion of our proceeds to a charity that plants trees. That gives the brand a little moral heft and authority. It also shows the consumer that we care, which is important when marketing to a younger audience. Young audiences can smell dishonesty from a mile away and they simply won’t tolerate it anymore.

 


Process and Observations


I found a few competitor sites that sell wood watches and sunglasses, but I didn’t like them enough to take much from them. There was a lot of cheesy photoshopping and tacky designs. Instead, I decided to spin the brand like Timex, but in the woods. I paired lifestyle shots with pictures of forests and bold blocks of color with the headlines.

This site is when I discovered the art of the footer. I manipulated a photo of a forest in photoshop to have a sort of stencil-painting quality, muting out the background to white so that the pages themselves could fade into the footer for a smooth transition. It’s a little detail, but I think it makes the page a little more…delightful. One of my favorite tools as a designer is delight. Things that make you smile, just a little. Things that add just a little extra on top of a nice user experience. Powdered sugar on top of a brownie.

 


 

 

 

 

 

Conclusions


I’m very proud of my work on this website and this brand. I designed and coded the front end myself, and while it took a while, I am very happy with how it turned out. The site is mobile-friendly and looks pretty sharp regardless of your screen size. It was a learning experience, but went relatively smoothly, and I gained a lot of confidence as a front end designer and developer from making this site and I’m pleased with how it looks.