Mountains of Compost
Category
Photojournalism
Grassroots, Nurtured by Compost
As an initiative for a home-composting brand, the team was tasked with finding our first customers—an often herculean effort. With a limited budget, we could have just ran ads in specific regions, hoped to convert, and scaled the old-fashion way—but asked ourselves where our customers might be most accessible, how we might connect with them organically, and who could advocate for the brand to win trust.
The answer we found was in the mountains of Bozeman, MT where Happy Trashcan Composting operated and had a built in customer base that we could tap into, meet with, receive direct feedback from, and learn from.
Piled High
During the team's visit to Bozeman, I was sent on location to document the entire process for the team at HTC—from doing pickup rounds at local businesses and residences, to unloading that week's haul, and churning the piles.
What was most striking, both for myself and the rest of the team, was just how massive the food waste issue was—even if just for a specific region of the country. With the mountains as its backdrop, food waste was piled into its own mountains to be broken down into compost, and then redistributed to local farms and residences to be put back into the food system and prevent the harmful release of methane into the atmosphere.
While many home composters are accustomed to churning their piles manually, it was an entirely different experience witnessing massive construction equipment moving multiple tons of food with the mountains sitting behind them for scale.
The Campaign
After a few days documenting the process with the team at HTC, we tabled at the local farmers market alongside their team to meet with their customers directly, answer questions, receive feedback, and collect signups for our upcoming launch.
The direct feedback was invaluable for the team to better understand how real users would interact with our product, their hesitations for potential adoption, and also to better understand demand as we grew closer to launch.
Launching with Confidence
After the trip had concluded, we began a rollout of our content captured during the visit to distribute through both our own social channels—and the channels held by HTC. Paid campaigns on our side were rolled out to broader audiences to capture similar communities with the content, spread impact, and capture additional signups leading up to the launch of the product.
The campaign not only stood up the business by keying in on a key demographic of users who became our early adopters, but helped us frame our messaging to broader audiences having already learned and made accommodations for the feedback and roadblocks that had been shared during our time at the farmers market.
