By LaDiff's Graphic Designer & Marketing Liaison,Juliette Heydenrych
First of all, I’d like to congratulate Elevation. As friends & colleagues they never cease to amaze us with their flare for fun & quality work. At this year’s Richmond Ad Club awards, Elevation was named best Ad Agency of the year- a well deserved and hard-earned honor. So, I raise my glass (re-usable water bottle, actually) to Aaron Dotson and Frank Gilliam.
Last year, I wrote a little blog about the making of our fun Bedroom Sale TV ad and our Perfect Seat Sale TV ad, both of which were produced by Elevation. BOTH of these ads won a silver award in the Richmond Ad Club awards for best ad with a budget under $100,000- beating out ads for Geico and FreeCreditReport.com. Again, I raise my glass to you, Elevation.That said, I’m going to switch gears a little bit.
Now, if you’ve seen our latest ad on TV featuring LaDeals, you might be wondering, What the heck do baby chicks have to do with furniture? More importantly, what the heck are LaDeals?
I’ll address the latter question first.
If you’ve ever broken your back hunched over a disastrous self-assembly with no one to call for help, then LaDeals are for you. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I can’t afford anything at that store” when it comes to deciding where you’ll purchase your new sofa or office desk, LaDeals are for you. If you've ever lived with a cheap, crappy coffee table with a wonky leg that looks like it’s trying to walk away, then LaDeals are for you.
What I’m about to say next might be a little intimate and I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable, but I simply have to come clean about something if I am going to properly explain the true meaning of LaDeals.
Alright, here it goes. Deep breath. My dirty little secret: I am an IKEA shopper.
Well, I was.
It’s not the quality or even the style that first attracted me to IKEA, but the prices. As a poor, fresh out of college starving artist, IKEA appealed to me because it offered me the chance to lose the hand-me-down hodge-podge furniture and make my apartment MINE. My taste, my style, my stuff. Oh, and my wallet.
Hauling things home and assembling everything was time-consuming and painful, and when things didn't quite assemble properly I accepted it as a consequence of going cheap- I wasn't about to lug everything back to switch it out and do it all over again!The interior of my home was okay, I could live with it for the time being. When I made the decision to move to Richmond from the West Coast two years ago, I did so knowing I had an extremely low budget and would have to leave a lot of things behind. I brought with me nothing but boxes, my mattress and my two lovely cats. I minimized everything I owned as much as possible, loaded up the car with everything I could not live without, and well, here I am. I made the 3,000-mile trek, paid for gas, food and hotel stays on less than $1,000. Let the record state that I am a professional CheapSkate.
So when I got my first Richmond apartment, it needed to be furnished! No longer living in close proximity to the Store-Who-Cannot-Be-Named, and not wanting to drive a grueling 2 hours north, I started my search at home in Richmond. At LaDiff.
The first thing I hear when I tell people where I work is “Oh, I can’t afford that place”. As a professional cheapskate, I have to say that I resent such a statement. With an apartment now crammed full of LaDiff furniture, and done on a shoestring budget, it’s everything I can do to shout to the naysayers, THAT’S NOT TRUE!
My apartment gets a lot of compliments. In fact, the company I rent from didn’t want to let me switch apartments last year until they had found a new tenant, JUST so they could show the place with my furniture in it. This was confessed to me by the rental company manager himself, who knows I work for LaDiff and added that my apartment “shows really well because of how it’s furnished”. It’s flattering.
So that’s how I feel about LaDiff. As a master CheapSkate extraordinaire, if I can furnish my apartment on a tiny budget at LaDiff, anyone can. LaDiff's team is always ready to help, and each item has it's own manufacturer's warranty so I don't have to live with a piece that I don't want to build myself, that might be missing hardware or falls apart when the cats run amock on it, that has a huge scratch out-of-the-box or worse.
Gone are the days of escape-attempting coffee tables, desks with peeling veneer tops and furniture that falls apart after 2 years. Here to stay are the days of LaDeals: Sexy LaDiff furniture with sexy pricing and even sexier quality (is that why there are so many hot chicks in our LaDeals ad?).
Good design should be available for everybody. It’s a sentiment shared by all of us here at LaDiff. We know we have a lot of work ahead of us in breaking down the myth that we can only satisfy those with champagne taste.
And that’s what LaDeals are all about.
Now, what to baby chicks have to do with furniture?
Stay tuned for part 2, and find out.
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