SAVE YOUR CITY
By 2021, over 2,800 New York small business owners had closed their doors forever. With those businesses, half a million New Yorkers lost their livelihood. Another 80,000 businesses faced the same fate, leaving as many as 1 million households struggling to feed their families and pay rent. However, as masking decreased and vaccinations became readily available, many felt as if things were going “back to normal.”
Seeing the pandemic’s impact on New York’s small businesses, entrepreneur and investor Oliver Libby brought a team together to start a campaign to gain public support for these establishments. We were happy to join that team, pro bono, as a way to give back and support small businesses.
WHAT WE DID
Strategy
Photography
Brand Identity
Social Media
Web
New York small business owners closed doors forever.
New Yorkers lost their livelihood.
Households struggling to feed
their families and pay rent.
Our goal was to get people to connect to these small businesses on a deeper level. We wanted to put faces to store names, to the humans that operate them and the humans they employ. We wanted to share their stories and the reality they were experiencing to make residents understand how it would personally affect them if their go-to spots were to close forever.
We appealed to the personal, sentimental value each store had, as well as the famous New Yorker pride that ensures loyalty to local community favorites. People don’t care if a laundromat or barbershop closes, but they care if their laundromat or barbershop closes. The one they’ve been going to for years. The one where the owner knows their name.
STRATEGY
In developing the brand identity, we wanted to include certain visual cues that were unique to New York. The mood of the identity was gritty, bold, and rugged, yet still uplifting and reassuring. We designed colorful assets to stand out in any out of home, on the storefronts, and in New Yorkers’ social feeds.
The campaign’s color palette was based on storefront signage and awnings found on local businesses, and the textured layout was inspired by the wild postings seen all around New York. Even when it came to fonts, we wanted to make sure every detail felt authentic. The secondary font used is the same as the
“I Love New York” iconography.
BRAND IDENTITY
PHOTOGRAPHY
To really connect the small business owners to potential donors, we traveled to each storefront to capture them in their element. The shots were natural and not overly posed, with eye contact to draw empathetic responses from viewers.
Social media posts condensed content from the website to make it bite-sized and shareable on Instagram. Using the colors and fonts described in the brand identity and images from the photo shoots, we shared the campaign’s big idea, as well as the story of each participating small business.
social media
website
The performance marketing was directed to a fundraising website. A key aspect of the site functionality was that we targeted payment areas down to the block radius within the neighborhood. The site encouraged donations and further participation by friends and family while displaying SMB owner stories.
