Video Content - An ongoing experience. (Never seen before footage from The Visor Campaign)

What is the best way to tell your product story?

This was one of the many but really important questions I asked myself when I first started AvidUnion. To engage consumers, by using any sort of online platforms, I came to the conclusion that the video is the most sticky content online. In this chapter, I will share with you how I created the Visor Hoodie as well as the concept of how the video was produced.

Before I continue, I must give credit to where credit is due. The Visor's initial creator was my wife, Audrey! After the complexity of creating The Shield, which was a product that was considered unusual for most manufacturers, we decided it was time to create something simple but still aligned with the brand of travel with technology. 

Before we came up with ideas, we decided to tackle the problems most frequent fliers were facing. One of the problems was, the lack of privacy we faced especially when we needed it most. Have you ever been caught in an embarrassing unsightly situation in which all you needed was just your own "space"? To have the luxury of no one starring at you when you needed your rest the most right before your next meeting upon your arrival?

Thus, The Visor was born. 

Our main criteria were lightweight, full coverage yet still uncompromised in our sight and our ability to breathe. Aesthetically cool was what we were going for and most importantly, like all our wearable products, it had to be extremely comfortable.

Finding 2 materials that can be stitched and washed with similar effects was more difficult than one can imagine. Certain aspects of my role as product designer were really honed due to AvidUnion. I found out early on that the simplest designs are usually the most complicated to manufacture.

I also realized that by having this mesh integrated into the hood allowed great peripheral vision when a hood is over your head. This was a design which I had not seen on hoodies during my research.

This design made using Headphones easy and looked clean.

There were too many issues I had with the traditional hoodies I found that inspired me to improve the design but for now, these were the few solutions I could solve that weren't too complicated in design for the manufacturers. 

Next, was the video. We've always believed in spending more on the product to ensure our backers receive the best that we can produce. When we started out, we didn't have the budget to produce high-end videos and that's why you can see that all the campaign videos feature my team and me.

We at AvidUnion have always taken a very "if it's not fun, don't do it" approach to video. Making consistent, good video content is so very challenging because you only have this 3-minute video to speak to your audience to convince them that this is the product that they need.  

You need to write a good script, You need to be a great photographer. You need to understand good storytelling. We actually did alright in the first 2 videos and I wanted to push the humor angle in our storytelling. It didn't take.

It was funny but it fell flat in an embarrassing way. All I can do was laugh, and learn from it. My very good friend here in the video, Andres, was also helping me out with the business end and I am so grateful that he was so good to hang in there with me for this video. Thank you again, Andres!!! Either way, we did another video but I wanted to share with you all, how sometimes, even the best of intentions can go very wrong. 

Brace yourself for the first version of the Visor video!

In the end, we still wanted to keep the humor for the video but decided to take another angle. To be honest, I am still unsure of how I feel about this but it was definitely a great learning example of the journey of making video content.

I think at the end of the day, there are many, many moving parts you need to keep in mind for the storytelling aspects of your brand. Videos are getting easier access due to the speed of data and many e-commerce platforms are already adopting more video-based product demonstrations on top of their photos of the products. Animated GIF is also something very useful for quick samples of your products or services in action.

There is also many aspects of your brand that supports the video content such as SCO and search but that is another story...

Sincerely yours,

Steven Yu | Founder and Executive Creative Director | AvidUnion