Taking a closer look at supply chain risks
Project
Role
Agency
Sedex is a membership organisation that provides one of the world’s leading online platforms for companies to manage and improve working conditions in global supply chains. One of their tools is a ‘risk radar’ – a platform for businesses to check the risks associated with their supply chain, from discrimination and poor working conditions, to working hours and low pay. Sedex approached Octopus Group (Publicis Groupe UK) to create a site that would help increase awareness and uptake of the tool.
Approach
I was adamant in avoiding the obvious route of graphs, explainer copy, editorialised images to communicate the insights, and instead do something creative and stand-out. With that in mind, the creative idea was based on one simple question: how might we show people inside the supply chain of products? The answer was simple: by showing the supply chain journey within the product themselves.
We worked with Sedex to agree the products we’d focus on, and mapped out the associated risks for each one. These included an orange carton illustrating the risks associated with growing oranges, factories, water supply and logistics; a shoe, illustrating the risks associated with leather, inner, rubber and cardboard manufacturing; a toolbox, illustrating the overall risks associated with manufacturing, from discrimination, pollution, forced labour, and excessive hours.
Although we were constrained by a very small budget, while we could have used illustration, rendering these out in 3D was designed to help increase impact when revealing internal scenes inside real, physical products. It would've been great to use true interactive 3D models in the site, but - again - due to budget we focussed on using flat imagery and a simple single scrolling page for each product. Similarly, to reduce production time, each visualisation used off-the-shelf assets as much as possible that we then 'cut' open, placing a mix of newly created and pre-existing objects inside, allowing us to focus on the task of composition and art direction rather than unnecessary time-intensive modelling.
The result was a site that brought supply chain risks to life, avoiding obvious data-led approaches, and instead engaged its audience through beautiful and compelling visualisations.
RESULTS
