In the DIY home improvement ecommerce game everyone is competing with Home Depot and Lowes. These are behemoth brands that can throw money at any problem. Name any point of traffic competition (paid search, Facebook ads, product videos, whatever) and they have a department behind it – a DEPARTMENT! Meanwhile the scrappier DIY product upstarts of the world might only be able to get a single employee on it, if that. So to get a piece of the pie you have to get smart, real smart, with how you handle business online.
And that’s exactly what our client, Blindster, did. In just a few short years Blindster grew from just one guy with a love of blinds and a legendary level of keyword search skills to being one of the top three contenders of online blinds providers (hint: one of the others rhymes with Gnome Repo). That’s no easy feat on top of delivering a huge selection of custom order blinds and top notch customer service.
To stay one step ahead Blindster wanted to improve their customer experience even more with high quality lifestyle product videos for every product. Not only that, but to provide resource videos for every product as well on how to measure, order, and install their blinds. They wanted to take advantage of their nimble, customer-centric position and become the go-to resource online for DIY blinds. That’s something the big boys might take months to more than a year to implement. So we teamed up with Blindster to produce their product videos and make it all happen.
Building the Set
We all landed on the creative aesthetic for the product videos quickly. Our team knew we wanted something bright and airy that felt super modern, but still cozy and homey with a DIY weekend kind of vibe between the characters. Each video needed to make installing blinds feel like putting the finishing creative touch on a new house to make it a home.
But logistically this was going to be a challenge. We’re talking upwards of thirty product videos where blinds needs to be installed and uninstalled over and over again. In a real setting that amount of drilling would tear up someone’s house so we knew that was out. We needed to build a set from scratch where we could quickly do patch work and control every single aspect of the look and production.
Our team designed and built the set on a soundstage from the ground up with a three folded wall setup where the camera could look head on (sitcom style) and also profile with an actor at the window, but never reveal the stage around the walls. Neutral wall colors allowed us to swap furniture between videos to give each video a fresh look that best complimented the different products, but never clash. Our team could move in and out of the set to get the coverage we needed exactly how we planned since we built it all ourselves. No surprises.
Crafting the Look
We lit the room with a big soft LED source overhead, which we could control from the ground to change color temperature and intensity. Some scenes we wanted to feel like bright early morning and some we wanted to feel like a warmer end of day look. Outside the windows we felt like a green screen would add too much post-production complication and we wanted all of the focus to be on the products themselves and the action inside the room anyway. So we bounced multiple HMIs into a huge white screen behind each window to give it that overexposed, but soft exterior light.
Production took about 7 days from start to finish to build the set, shoot, swap products and scenery, and roll through each setup. Lots of hard work from everyone involved and in the end we produced some stunning product videos that span across individual products, installation instructions, and brand story to help Blindster maintain that top notch customer experience that keeps them coming back for the high touch service.
