My projects are of my design.

I don’t think of life as anything less than a great design and I feel that great design is part of life. Every project I embark on is in some way, shape or form…designed. I believe in the concept of “design thinking.” For those of you who don’t know what that is, I invite you to look it up and put into practice. Conceptually it takes over your life to make things better, smoother, and even happier. Below is a project I am currently working on in life. Some of my projects are big and some are small, yet it seems they all take the same path when looking for creative solutions and always lead to answers of some great questions. I hope you enjoy the view of my journey.

I think that experiential design is experiential for everyone, the doer and the receiver, all the same. I also believe that experiential design is experimental in that the expected outcome can often be unexpected in a good and positive way. Serendipity.

My son, Noah, is a bee keeper. A hobbyist, yet we never have to buy another ounce of honey, that’s for sure. For those who don’t know much about bees and honey, the time when the bees make honey is called “flow.” So there is “spring flow” and “fall flow” and the time between, summer, there is very little flow, due to the lack of rain and dormancy of flowers. In order to get more honey we decided to plant more flowers in summer…sunflowers. With nine acres of land at our disposal we plant slightly more than an acre of sunflowers next to our bee hives. We prepared the property and, with the help of our farmer friend, we planted perfect, spaced rows. Simple. This is where the design process started and finished, or so we thought.

As we celebrated the first sign of sunflower emerging from the ground, we decided to name our property… The Hill. A perfect and fitting name, as a good portion of our property is a hill. Noah started an Instagram page @thehil.716, (our first blush at sunflower social media). We posted pictures and videos of us planting seeds and pointing at little green buds popping from the dry summer soil. A few hashtags later and people started following. Hmmmm.

Considering this is happening in 2020, right in the midst of COVID 19, we decided to contact friends and family to come out and walk through the sunflowers in an unrestricted, don’t-need-to-wear-your-mask kind of way (though we highly encouraged social distancing and hand washing) yet wanted to offer fresh air and comfort to those looking for it.

What happened next was truly amazing and a case study in the power of experiential events and planning, social media, exponential increase and the unexpected response of a market in a viral way… we blew up!!!

On day one, we were thrilled with a handful of visitors. Then “she” showed up. “She” loves sunflowers and has an Instagram page (4k followers) for the nearest local village, highlighting all the great things about it and what’s going on. So “she” post about The Hill, referring to us as the “Southtown Sunflowers.” People started following our page. We started with 5 followers and within two days we had 30. Day three, we noticed more cars with more people. Next, “Step Out Buffalo” followed us and even mentioned us to their 50K followers as “a definite place to visit” and BOOM! we were on the map.

Furthermore, a local radio station posted a visit by one of their on-air personalities to their web page, as well as mentioning us on the radio. Not to be outdone, two local TV stations sent reporters out to do interviews. We literally were the talk of the town in every possible media and it was all organic, nothing paid. And the people came, and kept coming. In all we guess somewhere between 5,000 and 7,500 people visited our little sunflower patch and we grew our Instagram followers to a steady 1500+ in just two weeks.

This is the amazing thing that we reaffirmed…creating a relevant experience for people is the single most important thing to success. If you offer a good product, kind service, honesty, and a smile to a group of people who value what you are offering, you will be successful whether you planned for it or not. What’s more, the amount of communication people have readily available to them can work wonders in your favor (keep in mind, it can work against you if you do not offer good product, service or honesty, too.)

We had no expectations that our sunflowers would bring such happiness. We thought our benefit would be more honey from our bees. Yet the biggest benefit I garnered was a greater understanding of the power of organic social media.