Positioning Door Hardware As a Design Statement: The ELEVATE Design Collective
Brand Voice, Content Strategy, Multi-Channel Campaign, Executive Thought Leadership
The Situation
Door hardware, faucets, fans, countertops, and appliances — all had long been an afterthought in interior design conversations. Architects and designers often chose these last. We saw an opportunity to change that, but recognized that no single brand could shift that perception alone. So the solution was to stop competing and start collaborating.
The Approach
Schlage spearheaded the ELEVATE Design Collective, a first-of-its-kind alliance of six industry-leading home accent brands: Delta Faucet, Formica, Hunter Fan, JELD-WEN, KitchenAid, and Schlage. The mission was to bring home accents to the forefront of the interior design conversation, positioning them not as finishing touches but as design anchors.
To give the collective a visual and conceptual center of gravity, brand designers from each of the six brands traveled to Pantone's New Jersey headquarters to collaborate with the Pantone Color Institute on something that had never been done: a custom color created exclusively for the collective. The result was Single Malt, a rich, rustic neutral designed to be both modern and timeless, with warmth that could work across contemporary and traditional interiors alike.
The color became the thread that tied the campaign together. Interior designers Jennifer Wagner Schmidt of JWS Interiors and kitchen consultant Mary Jo Peterson used Single Malt as the foundation for a full loft redesign in SoHo, with custom products from each brand integrated throughout. The loft debuted during New York Design Week as an exclusive launch event, a physical, fully realized proof of concept.
My role centered on brand voice and content. I worked closely with Ted, then Schlage's Industrial Design Manager, who served as the creative thought leader for this initiative. Using the same immersive ghostwriting approach I'd developed with other executives — weekly sessions, recordings, drafts shaped around his voice and expertise — I helped translate his design vision into content that could travel across every channel the campaign touched. Any copy that touched a channel went through me.
Watch Ted and the ELEVATE designers discuss the creative process behind the collective and the Single Malt color, filmed on location at the SoHo loft during New York Design Week.
The Results
The campaign drove 407.7 million total program impressions, 148% of goal. Social reach hit 1.93 million impressions, 172% of goal. The marketing agency that led the PR and digital execution was recognized with a Silver Award from the Advertising Annual 2018 Competition.
Beyond the numbers, the campaign did what it set out to do: it put home accent brands in a conversation they had previously been excluded from, with the creative credibility to back it up.
And it changed Ted's trajectory. The visibility he earned through the ELEVATE campaign contributed directly to his appointment as Schlage's Style and Design Chief, a newly created role that recognized his emerging voice in the design world. He has since been featured in the Washington Post.
What Made It Work
The insight that drove everything, that no single brand could shift an industry perception alone, but six aligned brands could, is as applicable to content strategy as it is to marketing partnerships. A unified voice, a shared creative anchor, and a physical manifestation of the concept gave media and designers something real to engage with. Press releases don't change perceptions, but experiences do.
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