Case Study - United By Blue

**United By Blue**

Founded by Mike Cangi and Brian Linton, United By Blue is a sustainable lifestyle and apparel company with a mission: to remove one pound of trash from rivers and waterways for every product sold.

They educate about environmental sustainability, make clothes, bags, and accessories from sustainable materials like hemp fiber and recycled plastic, and plan and sponsor waterway cleanups worldwide – from local Pennsylvania rivers like the Schuylkill to places like Manila, Philippines.

So far, they have removed over 3.6 million pounds of trash.

United By Blue not only has a storefront in Philadelphia and retails directly from their website, but they also wholesale their products to many other retail stores around the world (such as REI, Target, and some U.S. National Park gift shops). We even spotted some of their products in a Yellowstone National Park gift shop during a recent vacation.

In 2015, when Liam started making videos for a small shop in Kennett Square, PA that sold United By Blue products, he knew he wanted to eventually work with them. He reached out to Mike Cangi via email, showcasing the videos we had created for the local store, but at the time Mike wasn't ready to make videos for UBB. He said he might be interested later on, though, and to reach out again in the future. Liam took that suggestion very literally, and every six months or so for the next three years Liam would email Mike again to check in and see if they were interested in partnering to do a video project. Finally, in Spring of 2019, the United By Blue team reached out to us and said, "We have a crazy idea."

One of the problems the UBB team had was the disconnect between their customer base and the promise to remove a pound of trash for every product sold. With a claim so big, people had a hard time believing the cleanups were actually having an impact, even though UBB had people organizing trash cleanups full-time as part of their business model. Early in 2019, the UBB cleanup team had started planning their biggest ever cleanup project on the 300-acre Burlington Island located in the middle of the Delaware River (a source of drinking water for millions of people). Their goal was to remove 100,000 pounds of trash off the island, which had been left behind decades ago by different commercial entities.

Since this was the most complicated and in-depth project they had ever put together before, they thought it was the perfect opportunity to document how UBB organizes their waterway trash cleanups. Mike Cangi asked Liam if we wanted to partner with them to create a documentary, telling the story of the project from beginning to end. Obviously, we said, yes! You can watch that documentary and learn more about the unique history of Burlington Island here.

The documentary was a success and it allowed their audience to see the inner workings of the United By Blue team and the effort put into their cleanups.

A few months later, United By Blue was working on the release of their latest product line. This included waterproof bags made from recycled plastic bottles, socks made from a blend of bison fur and merino wool, and shirts made from hemp fiber. This product launch was a large-scale ordeal and encompassed partnerships with different manufacturers around the world. After seeing the impact the documentary had to communicate the story of their cleanups, the United By Blue team reached out to us again with the goal of creating a suite of videos to tell the story of these three different sustainable materials, from the source to the final product.

We harnessed the power of the internet to find filmmakers all over the world who were local to the different farms and manufacturers where the materials were being sourced or manufactured, and could capture footage to send back to us in the U.S. We collected footage from British Columbia, Canada (where the bison fur is sourced), Osage, Iowa (where the bison fur and merino wool are blended and turned into socks by a local manufacturer), and Qingdao, China (where the hemp fiber is grown and manufactured into apparel). Then, we combined that footage with other media we recorded at United By Blue’s headquarters and crafted it into videos that UBB was able to incorporate in their marketing campaign to launch the new product lines.

Some time passed, and then the Coronavirus pandemic hit the United States. With all of the shutdowns and travel restrictions, UBB’s retail and wholesale strategies had to pivot. The industry conventions where the UBB sales team would have traveled to connect with their wholesale customers were all cancelled for the year, so they now had to rethink how they showcased their product lines to those customers.

Part of that pivot to keep the ship afloat included creating an interactive wholesale-only virtual product catalogue that their wholesale customers could interact with. The UBB wholesale director reached out to us, and since we were already so familiar with their business, he wanted us to help create the video elements of this new interactive virtual catalogue. This was different from the previous projects we had done with UBB, because instead of being used as a public-facing marketing effort, these new videos would be deployed as select elements of their new wholesale strategy.

For these new videos, we focused on the story of how the designers came up with the new products. They shared their initial inspiration for the designs, and how they evolved into a finished product line. Then, we had the UBB sales reps walk through each new type of product on camera. The end result was a series of lean, well-produced videos that captured the uniqueness and beauty of the products to be shared with their wholesale customers.

United By Blue is a large company with many different departments, from retail to cleanups to sales, each with different needs and problems, yet video provided a solution to each of the different problems that these departments had. They went from being hesitant to jump into the world of video production to consistently using it as a tool at their disposal to communicate with their audience, drive sales, and fortify their brand. We've loved every opportunity to work with the diverse team at United By Blue and we look forward to following their brand as they continue to make the world a better place for us all.