We believe high-quality print communication cuts through digital clutter like nothing else. And there’s science to support this. Physical material is better connected to memory and involves more emotional processing than digital content. And for brands, there’s proven ROI, too. This deep emotional connection generates results for brand awareness as well as transactional conversion. That’s why so many of today’s most innovative marketers are investing in print.
Brands have a powerful opportunity — like never before — to make an impact with print in their arsenal of marketing media.
Magazines in our DNA
Our Print Team
Redbird’s origins, dating back to 1996, are rooted in custom publishing. Founder Susan Gates was a magazine executive in New York for many years, prior to launching Redbird to create print magazines for national brands. Redbird’s passion for and excellence in print publishing is unmatched. Our award-winning editors and creative directors grew up inside the halls of Conde Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., National Geographic, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Hachette. We customize teams for each print project we take on, pulling in colleagues who are not only at the top of their game, but are an ideal fit for the brand and subject matter.
“This magazine is the embodiment of our brand. It’s everything we see as our potential, and more.”
Sam Toole
CMO, California Closets, on Ideas of Order
Selected Case Studies
Costco
Connection Magazine
With a circulation of more than 30 million every month, Costco Connection was strongly grounded in smart content, and beloved by an ever-growing, loyal membership following. But, with challenging competitors on the horizon, Connection needed to take its next leap forward. Redbird was invited to help Costco’s internal publishing team reimagine and update this important brand marketing publication.
Keeping Costco’s goals top of mind – to capture the Millennial market, maintain and grow current readership, and target new revenue opportunities – we rooted ourselves in the theme of Connection. We explored data, findings, and insights to help us carefully shape and inform our recommendations for editorial repositioning, clear and fresh design, and a new logo and cover approach.
We developed a prototype, story lineup, and series of templates that Costco’s internal team would use going forward. And we coached the team, ongoing so that each new issue would match and exceed the prototype’s ideals.
California Closets
Ideas of Order
California Closets is a renowned leader in premium and luxury space management that prides itself in superior products, unparalleled service, and acute customization. Committed deeply to their craft and customer, California Closets’ leadership believes inherently that exceptional design changes people’s lives. Furthermore, they believe the combination of superlative quality, elegant form, and innovative function provides the space to think creatively, live freely, and focus on what matters most.
Ideas of Order — an editorially-driven, national-quality print magazine with a corresponding website — is the brand’s vehicle for this belief. The name itself, Ideas of Order, is inspired by Wallace Stevens’s poetry and positions the brand in its purest and most courageous form: a smart, celebratory embodiment of designing a better life—one rooted in calm, confidence, and joy that vibrantly demonstrates how personal surroundings can become a place from which good emanates into the world.
Redbird is proud to have been awarded two Pearl Awards for Ideas of Order by the Content Council: Best Magazine – Design, and Best Magazine – Overall. The magazine and its accompanying cross-platform content also won Best Project of the Year from the Content Marketing Institute. The awards are not only in recognition of the creative, but also of the 42x ROI the initiative brought to California Closets within three months of sending the magazine to customers.
Tastemade
Gathering — A Guide for Hosting at Home
Tastemade is a digital food network that reaches more than 100 million people a month across 200+ countries through original and user-submitted videos. Tastemade had a video partnership with Boursin, but also wanted to offer the gourmet cheese company a high-quality cookbook. The only hitch: Tastemade is all about video. They needed a partner with deep experience making top-quality print, sticking tightly to brand guidelines while innovating creatively.
Redbird was the partner of choice. We took on the project, soup to nuts: We wrote, styled, and photographed dozens of Boursin-centric recipes and craft projects, collaborating with some of the finest talent in recipe development, food, and design. Then we wrapped all into a crisply designed, lay-flat, hard-bound book distributed by Boursin to its worldwide customer base.
Banner Health
Healing Space Magazine
Long-time client Banner Health is the largest healthcare network in the Southwest. Their purpose, “making healthcare easier so that life will be better,” infuses all that they do. The Banner-University Medical Center in Tucson was two months out from opening and celebrating its new $500 million hospital — a state-of-the-art facility, and a gift to the people and communities of Tucson. To celebrate this remarkable achievement, Redbird quickly developed, soup to nuts, a magazine called Healing Space. The 100% carbon neutral, perfect bound publication tells stories of the nurses, doctors, patients, and volunteers who together make up the fabric of the hospital and its surrounding community.
Dickies & Cherokee
Scrubs Magazine
Strategic Partners, Inc., the largest manufacturer of medical scrubs and the owner of the Cherokee and Dickies brands, wanted to reach their core customer – nurses – more effectively. They had business goals of gathering data to improve product development, driving foot traffic to brick-and-mortar retailers, and bubbling up recognition as sponsors of multiple philanthropic programs.
In order to establish authenticity and authority with the nurse audience, Redbird launched a lifestyle brand for nurses called Scrubs, with a quarterly print magazine at its very center. Scrubs was developed to celebrate the nurse’s life — on the clock and off — and was distributed through hospitals and at the retailers where Cherokee and Dickies scrubs were sold. At launch, we surveyed more than 10,000 nurses on what mattered to them, and from there developed a print magazine accompanied by a popular website and a series of social platforms that together provided nurses a place to learn, laugh, connect, engage, and share. The Scrubs brand reached more than 3 million nurses every month. The print magazine had a high pass-around rate, with 5.6 readers per issue, and 98% of surveyed readers saying they would read the magazine again.
