 Well, it seems like we're getting more architects that are just specifying the product. That doesn't mean that the job ends and we're like, yay, we got the job. This is when we have to talk with the contractors and all the subcontractors and the people that are in between. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, and we have a great show lined up for you today. We've got Walter Laurie, who's the sustainability manager at Moffy on the show this day. We're going to be talking about how they're bringing the product to market, what's working for them from marketing at sales standpoint, and how they are anti-greenwashing and what that really means and how they're getting in front of architects and landed jobs. So Walter, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks so much, Zach. I'm really interested in what you've got going on and excited to be here today. Great. And so, Walter, for our listeners, share a little bit about Moffy, what you do specifically as a sustainability manager, and then we'll dive in and hear a little bit about what's working for you. Sure. Moffy is an old Austrian company, very conservative. They're very specific on what they do. They're quality manufacturers of natural surfaces, and what that means is they're just essentially making a wood floor that we can use for wall ceilings and floors. And how it works is that we take the log itself, slice it down into little tiny pieces, and we glue three alternating layers together, and then simply put oil over the top of it to make it a completely organic material surface. And then you can install it wherever you'd like without using any adhesive or nails, and then we can interact with it as a biological element. And it actually increases the health of the air and the space, and it is totally organic and natural. Yeah, I was checking out your product online. It's very beautiful, really, really pretty product. I'm curious to know, who do you market and sell to? Well, right now, we market direct. Any retailer or any person who wants to buy the product can go online and go to moffy.com and purchase our products. You'll likely encounter me or any number of our dealers across the US. Or what we specifically do is target the architects because they're the ones that are going to be able to translate this message of introducing a healthy interior product to a client where most marketing is focused through other dealers, I would say like lumber liquidators or something like that, where they're just pushing the color, they're pushing the cost. We're pushing an ideal. We're pushing a lifestyle. And that's hard to translate through a dealership network because those guys need to sell products in order to keep the lights on, and they'll sell whatever they can. We have a super beautiful product. The displays are unbelievable. But people will walk in the door and say, oh my gosh, that's so beautiful. How much is it? And we're usually a little bit more expensive, as you can figure, we're a handmade product in Austria versus, hey, this is only X dollars a square foot and it's 30% less. They're going to sell that and they're not going to push the ideal. So the architect is the one that is culturing this education of sustainability and help the awareness of a human-centered interior. Yeah, I can imagine, and I'd love to take on this, that your audience, let's say, is primarily residential products? No, we do. About 50-50 commercial residential. Okay. So are you seeing owners and even homeowners, for that matter, their education level increasing, or they're going to the architect and saying, hey, I want a healthy, you know, built environment. I want a healthy home, something to that extent. And they're actually bringing your product to them as well. Yeah, definitely. Maybe more than, let's say, even five years ago. Yeah, for sure, especially since the pandemic, everybody's hyper-sensitive about what materials are in their space. We just keep hearing about how plastic is bad and we can't recycle it enough and that there's all these toxins in the air. So people are looking for a product that is good for them. And, you know, they're buying organic foods more than ever. They're really hyper-focused on what's good for them, knowing that 90% of our time is indoors and that the air indoors is two to five times more pollutant than exterior air. So they're like, what is in our space? I know, I've read about that recently. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, it's unbelievable the amount of materials that we just simply live with and we don't even know that they're necessarily harmful for us. So the architects are the ones that are telling everybody about this. So are you targeting very specific architects that you're like, hey, we know these firms really care about sustainability in a way that aligns with our product? Or are you like, hey, we want to educate everybody? We want to educate everybody in the end. Of course, we want other wood flooring manufacturers to do what we're doing. We shouldn't be selling a product that we know is temporary, right? Especially now that we're concerned about carbon emissions and we're concerned about the end of the world and all that, that we should be selling a product that is super resilient. If you sell a plastic coated floor, any floor that's coated in polyurethane is plastic, it's not a wood floor anymore. It's a plastic surface supported by wood. And so when that surface wears out, the first thing you have to do is take that old plastic layer off and that mechanically degrades and reduces the life of that floor by a third. And so if you can make a product that you don't ever have to sand again, one that could be there for a thousand years, but secondly, it's constantly invigorating the air at the same time. So it's doing two things and products that are normally in the market are sold because of the color and the cost. And that usually has a plastic layer on it because it's less liability. You just blame it on the guys that are walking. I used to write warranties for a manufacturer in Canada. And my job was to make it so that they weren't at fault. It wasn't the manufacturer's fault. So I don't believe in a long term production scheme should include making products that are definitely going to fail. That's part of the transparency in the anti-greenwashing thing that we like to do. So how are you getting in front of architects? Are they finding you? They are. They're finding us in a couple of ways. First of all, we are sponsors of the International Living Future Institute and Mindful Materials and the Healthy Product Declaration Collaborative, which is an open standard that displays your products materials. You can decide based on that information whether it's healthy for you or not. Obviously, we want it to be as healthy as possible. But through those organizations, we have created certification labels for our product that make it so that architects cannot specify anything else because it doesn't meet the criteria. Interesting. So you developed the certifications. Is that right? Or you work with somebody else? No, these organizations. Okay. And then we just spent the money and the time. And that's been my job for the last three and a half years is 24-7, trying to make sure that we have all the information that these organizations need to complete the paperwork so that, well, it goes way beyond that because you can't just fill out the paperwork. You have to have a product and a manufacturing process that complies to those standards of low-carbon emissions during manufacturing and where exactly do your products come from? And you need to trace it all the way back to every single ingredient. So for our oil example, you can't just say we use an oil. You have to say, well, where is that oil manufactured and who manufactures it and what are the components that make that oil that go into your product? And on it goes through the whole production line. So it takes a tremendous amount of transparency to get to the level that these certifications require. And then the architects are like, okay, we don't have to think about the social aspects of the manufacturing facility, what country it's in. We don't have to think about where these products are being made. Are they coming from a pollution increased source? Are they dumping all the components that are leftovers into the rivers and whatever else? This is like the third party verified certificate that says we're doing everything correctly. And does that get you in the door with architects that would otherwise be difficult to get in the door with? No question. What has happened is we've been able to talk with architects that in our dreams, we would never be able to talk to. Because you've gone through the rigmarole of getting certification? Yeah, it's been a long, long hard road. And I know because we've talked before to say, hey, come to us when you're ready. Well, here we are. We've taken those three years to really do the work of transparent manufacturing. And then these architects are finally going, oh yeah, okay. So everybody else is getting there close, but they're not actually making it so that I don't have to think about the decision. Do you go wrong? So they specify your product. It seems like the product almost at that point, if you go through this and tell me if I'm wrong here, Walter, you go through the process of getting the certification. You do all the upfront work, all the time, investment to make that happen. Is your sales process much easier without otherwise having the certification? Or are you still finding yourself not wanting as much work? Or the bit process is different? Like talk me through, after I get through the certification, you get your foot in the door more easily. What happens after that point? Well, it seems like we're getting more architects that are just specifying the product. That doesn't mean that the job ends and we're like, yay, we got the job. This is when we have to talk with the contractors and all the subcontractors and the people that are in between. And so when you have the advantage of the certificate and it makes it so that it's impossible to VE it, that makes that end of the job a lot easier. And we're finding out that we're getting projects at less price. We're not getting projects that are 40% discounted because the architect is saying, we have to have this because we have these criteria that we need to meet for the project. And this is a key component to that criteria that doesn't matter what the price is. Are you seeing this market growing? I know you mentioned COVID has changed things a lot, but have you seen a big shift over the last few years here, Walter? Because our manufacturers are probably listening going, okay, is this a market I should get into or should I even attempt to look into it? That's a very interesting question because I think that most manufacturers will do just fine without this certification. They've got their customer base, they've got their supply lines figured out. I say this only about true manufacturers. I don't say this about brands because there's a lot of brands that are relying on someone else to manufacture it. And if that manufacturer price goes up, they look for another manufacturer and then they get their brand. But true manufacturers have their customer base right now. I don't think it's necessarily super important for them. We just believe the way that we believe and we are totally dedicated to making our product completely transparent and as natural as possible. And we are the only ones in the world right now and we want to stay the only ones in the world that do that. But at the same time, I encourage more manufacturers to be transparent as possible because that helps the industry grow. It's not just a plastic surface product that has a different color and a different price. So talk me through your marketing here. It sounds like getting the certification, the transparency as you mentioned, is like your foot in the door. At that point, I mean, it's like this product almost sells itself. So it's like transparency, certification, that is the marketing. Right. I wish it were that easy. As you can imagine, for example, there's one architecture firm that has 7,500 architects in it. And so I'm not able to just because I've got the certificate and I meet the sustainability manager, am I able to get to those 7,499 architects? So the specific marketing is targeted through LinkedIn. That's a big one that we use. And we are focused specifically towards those people that have the sustainability credentials, like lead APs or well APs, people that are within those small, small circles of the organizations that we support that are all kind of pushing the whole industry in that direction. Those are the ones that we target. And then ultimately, it comes down to a you and me conversation. At some point, it's easy to do just the specifications as a project goes, but then it comes down to how important is this really? And then you have to have that conversation and that's how you get. So you're leveraging primarily LinkedIn because you can see, hey, people are caring about lead certification or something to that extent on LinkedIn. Are you doing like one-on-one outreach or are you actually doing advertising? What's working for you to get in front of those architecture firms? Okay, a couple of things that we also are signed up for material bank. That's not specifically targeted, but that does get us a lot of interest in that field. The second thing is our website is unbelievable. It's beautiful. We do social media. We are creating videos and we send those videos directly to those targeted clients in LinkedIn. And then, of course, we're doing architectural presentations. So the biggest thing that we do is getting the attention of the person who's interested at the office. So we have a list of the architecture firms that are most interested in sustainability and we target those. And then when we get on the phone and we actually talk to these people, then we get the presentation scheduled. And that's when I can offer. I have a green-build certification industry. And so all the lead and well-AP professionals have to update their credentials. It's the same as the AIA, but more specific to sustainability. So my presentation is certified by the GBCI. And then I go in there and I meet 30 or 40 architects. I've been doing it over Zoom for the last couple of years. It works phenomenal. And then I have all their email addresses and then we hammer them on email. That's smart. Specific. You know, smart things that we're doing, new things that we're doing. We're always got new colors and things like that. So what advice would you give other manufacturers, Walter, who are thinking about this type of strategy? What advice would you give them? Because most manufacturers that do commercial style or commodity style wood floors are either doing it as an unfinished product or they're doing it as a pre-finished product. In the pre-finished products, I wouldn't necessarily try to focus those specifically on sustainability because of the artificial layer that's on the top. But the unfinished products, you could directly market those by using... There's one label that I think is the most important one and that is the declare label. And that's through the International Living Future Institute. And all that is is a transparency document that says what the ingredients are in the product. And most architects that are interested in sustainability are focused on some kind of a transparency document. All lead accredited projects have to have some kind of a sustainability document and the declare label is the easiest to get because a wood floor that's unfinished is just wood, right? There's one ingredient. So it's not hard to do. It's not expensive. And at least that's a step in the right direction towards a sustainable, transparent product. After all, all wood flooring manufacturers produce the most natural thing there is in an interior. I mean, there's nothing else that is natural. Look around your office. Everything is coated in plastic. Wood is the only thing you can bring in that's literally from nature. As a tree, you just slice it down, manipulate the size, dry it and stick it in the building. That's all you have to do. And you have nature inside. There's nothing else. So I want all projects to have a lot of wood in it. That's the big thing. And that's good for you, right? Yeah, absolutely. And but I think too, this idea of a healthy home and bringing that in, maybe your product can't have that, but understanding the trend of, hey, what are architects wanting and how does certification play into it is important for manufacturers to be thinking about because if you're able to get in with the architecture firms that you otherwise wouldn't be able to by using this methodology and by using this, it's a really great way for you to carve out an itch for yourself. Yeah. That's great. Well, Walter, I really appreciate you coming on the show. If someone wants to get in contact with you or wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Oh, you can email me at w.lourie at moffi.com or I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram at moffi underscore DC because I live in DC. You can go to moffi.com. That's where you should start and spend some time on that website. It's a eight hour tour for sure. That's awesome. Great. Walter, again, thank you so much for coming on the show and for our listeners. If you enjoyed this content, make sure you go to venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe to get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams. Thanks, everybody.