Sustainable Supplier Guide

MaterialsIndex

Oct 1

PROJECT MANAGER • ART DIRECTOR • WRITER

Opportunity

The Guacamole Airplane Supplier Guide is one of the main ways that clients’ discover the studio online. The supplier directory spotlights dozens of sustainable packaging suppliers that are manufacturing materials like plant-based plastic film alternatives, mushroom foam, and paper made from hemp waste.

The team wanted to give the Supplier Guide a face lift and make it easier to browse.

Execution

From the start, a few goals of the new supplier guide design were to make the individual supplier pages more consistent, increase SEO potential, and make it easier to browse.

Many suppliers don’t have high quality photography, so one of the first things I did was make the index page less reliant on imagery. The clickable categories up top also make the index page easier to navigate without too much scrolling.

Guacamole Airplane has met with many of the suppliers in the directory, so they have a unique, first hand take on what makes them great. So we added a “What we like about” section on the top of each page where the team can offer personal insight.

The biggest addition to the individual supplier pages was product blocks. A lot of the products are made from new materials that folks may not be familiar with. These product blocks give Guacamole Airplane the opportunity to offer some education and guidance about what to consider.

Process

I brought Guacamole Airplane’s supplier spreadsheet into Airtable to better segment and scale the data. A big part of this was deciding how to consistently name product. We decided on “material + structure” format.
With dozens of supplier pages to create, the design had to be completely dialed in before we started populating the guide. I tried different information hierarchies to dial in a design that would scale to suite all suppliers.
Finally, we got down to business, dividing and tackling each section to populate each supplier’s page. I templatized copy where possible. For example, sustainability and disposal information is the same for most paper-based boxes. But the films category was much more nuanced since there are so many different source materials and certifications in play.