AMHERST LABEL’S VERY SPECIAL AGENT
From Marketing Manager, Ruth Sterling
The story of our adorable AL character is a fun one.
In the summer of 2014, after developing a strategic plan called a “painted picture,” Amherst Label began focusing on outreach to customers at a level unprecedented for the company.
Early on we realized one communication tool that could be helpful in our outreach was a special character to serve as the face of Amherst label and help teach people about how capable and cool Amherst Label is.
Many of us—including president and vice-president Nick Calvetti and Nye Hornor—are Disney fans and appreciate Disney philosophy and creativity. Disney started with a mouse—a little character that represented qualities of the Disney company.
We decided to give Amherst Label a character to represent the company and to bring a breath of fresh air to our messaging. Often we at Amherst Label are called “the label people” so the idea of a personality made out of labels was starting to form and here’s how he came to life.
Developing our character
It is a little known fact that Thomas Hornor, a member of the next generation of the Calvetti line, has some artistic ability. (Thomas is the great-grandson of the founder, the grandson of our owner, and the son of our special projects manager and her husband, our VP of sales and marketing.) At our request, Thomas sketched a little guy made of labels who could represent us in our marketing efforts. We asked Thomas to create a character representing creativity, industriousness and craftsmanship who was very clever and attention-getting. Thomas put pencil to paper and drew the first image of a new character.
We executed his drawing in Illustrator software, making slight improvements and modifications.
And then the real magic happened when the art was sent to Amherst Label’s prepress department. The little guy came to life when he got his sneakers. He started glowing and gleaming in a way that really represented the creativity here, the goodness, the positivity. And he had charm and was immediately lovable.
You can call him AL
During a wintry commute, I realized that the little guy already had a name in my imagination, the initials of Amherst Label… AL. AL attracts attention for us. He is an adorable ambassador of Amherst Label in our communications to the world. So far, he has developed wardrobe and hobbies through suggestions about his outfits, his attitude, his vocabulary, etc.
And speaking of vocabulary, we have developed a long list of AL-words: ProfessionAL, traditionAL, motivationAL, heALth, hALloween, sALad… and on and on. We got excited about the word allies until we realized it could be misinterpreted as AL-lies. AL’s character is too pure for that.
Send us AL words if you think of any good ones. Hey! QuALity! We never thought of that one before.
No telling where AL will turn up, but he always bring positivity with him.
