Tag: Washington State Department of Commerce

Choose Washington State

Washington State Department of Commerce

Sustainable solutions, like business legends, are built to last. We helped the State of Washington’s Commerce Department identify and profile tomorrow’s regional business legends in the making. As in our previous work with Commerce – supporting the Washington Export Initiative with a series of profiles of outstanding exporting businesses – we traveled the entire state, featuring the next trillion-dollar software firm, Avalara, new initiatives and talent at the Gates Foundation, and star agricultural exporters Anderson Hay and Grain, among others.

Participants appreciated our news / documentary style, nimble, efficient production approach, and building their unique stories from the ground up – on location, person-to-person, collegial and conversational.

Washington State Department of Commerce uses “Choose Washington – Where Else?” on its web site, as a recruitment tool for new business partners, and to solicit foreign direct investment in Washington State.

Export Success: Swype

Washington State Department of Commerce

We all live moment-to-moment with our electronic devices and their keyboards. We profiled a company that’s invented a faster way to input information, and cut down that keyboarding time. Swype is now exporting that remarkable solution worldwide, and was awarded the “Exporter of the Year” award by Washington State Department of Commerce for sending its innovative software solution around the world.

We asked the Swype team to show us more than just their imaginative culture: staging a face-off between Swype input technology and conventional keystrokes; setting up timed relays among employees; gathering for a wacky group photo; probing for “how’d you get this far this fast” commentary from inventors and executives.

“Export Success Stories” assembled these two-minute videos into an influential campaign highlighting this critical sector of the state’s economy: Washington State is in fact the largest percentage exporting state in America, and a vital gateway to overseas markets. Our survey of top companies spanned the entire state, from agricultural to composites manufacturing.