Hosokawa Micron designs and builds integrated systems for powder and particle processing, hygienic filling and weighing, high-performance containment and nanotechnology, from its site in Runcorn, Cheshire. It's machinery that impresses in person and rarely does in a photograph. Michael Tamas, their Marketing Manager, wanted more than pictures of equipment. He wanted the people who build it at the heart of the story.
When Hosokawa planned a new website and brand overhaul with Move B2B, Move brought me in to create the stills and video.
The catch was that the production floor never stands still. What's on the line changes week to week, and so do the people working it. Before shooting, I worked with the floor manager to time the shoot around the build schedule, so the strongest products were mid-build and the right engineers were free to feature.
Each section of the new site needed a hero image to open it, so I photographed engineers working on real builds. I then used some of the same faces in the video, so the website and the film read as one campaign.
Move's script asked for capacity, scale and expertise. I shot the sequences to match it, opening with a drone shot of the exterior and following into the building to introduce the interior and services. That film now runs as the hero on the homepage.
A year after launch, I asked Michael what had changed. Year on year, the new website has seen users up 511%, sessions up 452% and contact form submissions up 446%, with time spent per visit above the industry average. Those numbers belong to the whole project, and Move's design and build did a lot of the heavy lifting.
What the images have done since is the part I'm proudest of. The team that wanted people at the heart of the story now has a bank of them to draw on. The photography runs through LinkedIn posts introducing colleagues and recruiting new ones, the meet the team page (now the third most visited page on the site), customer presentations, eBooks and guides, and the banners on their LinkedIn and YouTube channels.
"The new website has made a real difference to our digital presence, with users up 511%, sessions up 452% and contact form submissions up 446% year on year. Greg's photography was an important part of the transformation, helping us showcase our people, capabilities and facilities in a much more professional and authentic way. And having access to a strong bank of professional imagery has also made us much more agile in creating content across a wide range of marketing channels and applications."
Michael Tamas, Marketing Manager at Hosokawa Micron Ltd
If your website shows your equipment but not the people behind it, I'd be happy to talk it through. I've spent 18 years photographing and filming industrial and manufacturing sites across the North West and beyond. Get in touch and tell me about your project.