Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Dear Stevie Business Letter

The company I've been working for for the last 6+ years is being bought out and renamed. This new company named RED 7 STUDIOS is seeking to be a different kind of graphic design company. As a result one of my duties has been to draft a business letter explaining who we are. Here's my rough draft. Be warned it's a bit different.

____________________
Dear Stevie,

Red 7 is a highly creative (and technically gifted) graphic design studio. We offer humorous and offbeat marketing approaches for stuffy, uptight business folk. Maybe I should say we used to. Frankly, we’re sick of doing that. We’ve been throwing fist size pearls at those swine for years. So if you’re wearing a blue blazer and a red tie right now, STOP READING! We don’t want your business! Seriously. You don’t know a good idea when it hits you. Just stay in your protective business bubble following the other blue blazer wearing sheep in their bubbles. Got it?! Move aside “swine-sheep”, give the visionaries some room to pass.

Now if you’re still reading you’ve probably made one of three determinations. The first possible determination may be: What an arrogant company we seem to be. If that’s the case stop reading! Because you’re a stuffy, uptight business person in disguise. We told you to go away a paragraph ago. Or, secondly you may have determined: I fancy myself a visionary I’m gonna keep reading. (We like people like you. You make the best clients and get the best results). Or, thirdly you may have determined: Red 7 Studios is just what I’ve been looking for. I don’t know exactly what they do because I haven’t finished reading this. I’m going to call them right now anyway. (We like A.D.D. people too. The only downside is they drain our resourcces with all their little changes... sometimes they even stop by our office to use our conference table and bathroom with out so much as a howdy do. That being said, they’re good people but have weak listening skills.) Hopefully you have good listening skills because we do.

Now that we’ve weeded out the dead weight (ie.. stuffy uptight business people) we can get down to bidness and talk to you, the “Visionary,” “The Visionator,” “The Occular Prophet.” Or for sake of this brochure we’ll call you “Stevie” because that name can be trans-gender. So Stevie, here goes. Red 7 Studios is straight up KrEAtIvE!

To prove it, the boss-man went to remote Communist China and filmed 44 hours of video footage for a missionary fund raising DVD. You may be saying how’s that creative? Well you try going to China with 300 lbs of video gear and blend in. It doesn’t help being over 6 feet tall either. But where being over 6 feet tall does help, is when playing hacky-sack in Tienemen Square against tiny Chinese people. Then it’s a plus. (Check our web site for the video clip.) Here’s what else is creative about that DVD project. All the motion graphics, video editing and DVD coding were done in-house. It looked sweet too. Because the client said so.They even said it’s been their best promotional tool. We like result driven projects.

Here’s another creative thing we do. We draw cute characters. Typically clients ask us to draw really cute characters for their products. We like drawing cute. That’s not to say we can’t draw mean. We can draw real mean if you want us to. Some of these characters become so popular our clients create costumes based on them. These costumes are then donned by some malcontent on the hottest day of the year. Then told to walk “happy” in front of scared little kids. All in the name of brand awareness. We’re all about brand awareness. Even if it means scaring little kids... and hopefully scaring their parents too. That goes for the same with brand loyalty.

Guess what else we do that’s creative? Go ahead guess... ready?,,, we have an “annual peep® flush.” You know those yellow Easter Marshmallow treats shaped like a bird (mfd. by Just Born®)? We flush them (actually just one a year). That’s right Stevie, we bring joy to the face of every sewer worker who sees that bright yellow marshmallowy treat float by. That goes to show you we’re brand loyalists. Your brand (or business) deserves the same treatment.

Still want to know more about our creativity? OK. We take photos of stuff. Clients come to us asking for food and product photography. Like this one time we had to photograph an entire line of ice cream for Nestle® Foods. Let me tell you it was the real deal. That was real ice cream we were styling in our freezers. None of that fake Crisco® ice cream you see in advertisements. So here’s the deal, if we can photograph real ice cream under hot strobe lights we can certainly shoot something for you.

Still want more creative credentials? Our graphic design skills are top-notch. We’ve literally designed and layed out hundreds and hundreds of ice cream cartons. You probably even have ice cream cartons in your fridge that we worked on. But, you say I live in Puerto Rico. We even have ice cream cartons in Puerto Rico. Nice try Stevie. Here’s what else. We’ve designed thousands of cubic feet of logos and brand identities. That’s one of our special skills.

It goes without saying that we’ve designed brochures, sales sheets, static cling labels and nearly anything else where ink gets put on paper. As a matter of fact, if you know anything about printing we once heard someone say “increase the cayenne color.” We knew what they meant. We didn’t laugh and tell them it’s “cyan.” We did what they asked, just not literally. We should also mention we have mad skills (that’s a good thing) in the prepress department. We got our start in prepress. So we definitely know our color bars from our elbows. If you’re not sure, call up and ask the boss-man what an icc profile is and how to use it. It will make you cry... it’s like poetry.

Still not convinced about our abilities Stevie? What if I told you we have some serious bells and whistles in the web department. We do. We got ecommerce skillz, database driven web skillz and brace yourself, animation skillz. That’s right Stevie. We got some serious technical skillz that make the geneticist in charge of cloning Seigfried and Roy’s white lions want to quit his job. Guess what else? We know how to create VLOGS and BLOGS. That’s right blog’s and video blogs.(to prove check out ours....red7.blogspot....)

I don’t know about you Stevie but, if you don’t “get it” by now you aint never gonna “get it.” So if you “GET IT” pick up that phone and well send the six foot tall hacky-sack boss-man over to test your vision.

Warm Regards (unless you’re in a blue blazer and skipped to this part of the letter... in which case quit loitering).
______________________________

A bit strong? hmmm perhaps. Don't worry we have a normal business letter too.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not sure I'd hire you, but will deffinetely send you my rez.