One of the major names in the furniture and house furnishings and the second biggest chain in the UK. Walker Agency was the advertising company responsible for their national campaign who needed help with the television advertising, with my features partner Karl Howman commissioned as Land of Leather’s TV creative director. Everyone was aware of the complexity of the production involved as this was the era of war of the furniture stores with massive amounts of airtime and price competition on new sofas.
During peak campaign periods new ads featuring combinations of 70+ sofa suites were being filmed in two days, edited and sent to stations within three days afterwards. Two large studio stages were being used in turn to build/strike sets in one whilst shooting in the other with multiple crews. Special Marquees had to be built in order to house the suites, often consisting of over 250 pieces, which needed to be transported in sequence order and then shipped out few hours later back to the outlets. The complexity was almost as big as the drama feature series Breaking Free with much less time!
If you then imagine that this was the time when all ads were sent on video tape to stations manually by couriers, you might understand the sheer logistics of producing and sending over 150 tapes to 30 different broadcasters! My team of superb professionals took it all in their stride and we delivered the ads without a single hitch or delay, all on time and all under budget.
The clients never once had to look elsewhere for production as the expertise and quality simply could not be matched and continued their custom with me for almost two years until the company was sold on and then closed. The original owners of the company then went on to form World of Sofas and once again commissioned the team to produce their ads.
