Aldiss: All about sustainability

Aldiss is a family-owned home furnishing retailer in Fakenham, and they wanted a film about their sustainability work that didn't overclaim. Their own words for it were "doing what we can, when we can". For a business like Aldiss, sustainability is mostly marginal gains: the small practical changes that add up. They reuse packaging, there are solar panels on the store roofs and electric vans on deliveries, the café has a water fountain, and hundreds of the products on sale are made locally or in Britain.

Our job was to get the team to explain those changes to us and then find a way to show them. Nobody wanted to talk on camera, so we told the story through the footage itself, with large captions over shots of people doing the work. That suited the main use as well, because the film plays on screens in store where there's no sound.

We spent one day at the Fakenham store, the café and the distribution centre, moving between teams and filming each part of the story as we went. Making people comfortable mattered as much here as on an interview shoot, because we were filming them at work and asking them to carry on as normal. We delivered the main film with landscape and portrait versions for social, and later a clean version for the background of their new website.

We made this one with MA Marketing, Aldiss's agency. We've worked alongside them for years, and they know they can drop us into a business for a day with a clear goal and come away with a story.

Produced with MA Marketing.