Success Stories

The Back to School season is Crispy Green’s peak selling season. Their main goal was to maximize brand awareness and social engagement during this time through PR and Social Media to ultimately drive product sales.

The Back to School season is the opportune time to meet the needs of mom’s seeking healthy, convenient options for school lunches and snacks.  The goal was to maximize brand awareness of Crispy Fruit as the perfect healthy school lunch companion.

Create a storyline of the benefits of the Crispy Fruit product line as the perfect healthy lunchtime snack for busy moms. This story would be amplified and further validated through Crispy Green’s strategic partnership with a non-profit, Produce for Kids, through their Power Your Lunchbox program.  This program, along with the benefits of the Crispy Fruit product line, made the quintessential back-to-school story, and would be highlighted through several PR tools and social media.

The Fastlane team created the “story” and negotiated an outstanding satellite media tour, assisting in choice of talent, and providing key messaging and strategic direction. The campaign was supplemented with a NAPS release, as well as Fastlane PR and social media integration.  The combined efforts of this extremely well-integrated campaign produced nearly 185 million total impressions (broadcast, digital and social media).

Additionally, the #PowerYourLunchbox hashtag received over 66.5 million impressions, which Crispy Green was often mentioned or included as part of the post. Above all, these awareness efforts resulted in over 27,000 families pledging to pack healthier lunches, AND nearly 300,000 families in need receiving a meal from Feeding America!

“We are thrilled with the level of creativity and strategic thinking from the Fastlane team.  Their innovative approach led to a major collective win for Crispy Green, for consumers seeking healthier lunch and snack choices, and for families in need. Our strategic partnership is extremely well-aligned to our core mission, and our voices combined together have created a force in good, which we will continue building upon in the future.”

– Angela Liu, Crispy Green Founder & CEO

As the population continues to increase so does resource productivity, but it needs to be done in an environmentally friendly way to ensure sustainable development so not to deplete our resources. For more than 40 years, TOMRA N.A. has focused on transforming how the world obtains, uses and reuses its resources – striving to be a leader in the resource revolution. They do this by creating sensor-based Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs) that collect and recycle aluminum cans, glass and plastic bottles for optimal resource productivity.

TOMRA’s goal was to expand brand awareness in an effort to increase the number of their RVMs in bottle bill states (CT, MA, ME, MI, NY, VT). Another goal was to continue to generate exposure of their reverse vending technology as it relates to recycling solutions both on a national and global level.

Through a steady stream of product announcements, user case studies, byline articles, strategic partnerships and events, we continue to position TOMRA N.A. as an industry expert and a true leader in the field of reverse vending solutions.

As a result of our PR and social media strategy, we have generated an increase in media coverage both on a national and local level and increased fan engagement on Facebook and Twitter. As we move forward in 2018, we anticipate a significant spike in brand awareness as we develop and launch the first annual TOMRA Recycling Insights & Trends Report based on results of a consumer survey that TOMRA is commissioning prior to Earth Day 2018.

Skylands Stadium was seeking to be a top-tier family destination, offering year-round family entertainment and drawing customers from across the tri-state area. The stadium, however, is situated in a small market, in rural Sussex County, NJ, roughly an hour from New York City. It was also the former home of two professional baseball teams that subsequently left, leaving locals with a bad taste in their mouths.

Fastlane and Skylands Stadium instilled confidence in the local market that the new owners of Skylands Stadium were committed to the area by positioning the stadium as a year-round source for entertainment. The stadium was ever-present in the local media, creating a bond between the brand and a local community that had originally approached the stadium with cautious optimism.

The stadium’s events also successfully attracted major New York media players like The Today Show, Pix 11, Fox 5 and Telemundo by highlighting the unique visuals and experiences at the stadium. This expanded coverage has helped the stadium not only cement its place in the local community, but draw customers from across the tri-state area. As evidence of the stadium’s success and exposure, analysis from the 2016-17 calendar year show that news about Skylands Stadium reached an estimated 89.6 million people and news about the Sussex County Miners baseball team reached 92.2 million people.

“We wanted to work with Fastlane on our Skylands Stadium project because of the tremendous success we had working with them to promote one of our other major venture, State Fair Meadowlands,” said owner Al Dorso, Sr. “We knew we had a quality product, but Fastlane really helped us deliver our message and expand our brand’s reach far beyond Sussex County, NJ.”

Kontos Foods was trying to promote a relatively new wholesale product called International Pastry Puffs.  Known as Loukoumades in Greek culture, the pastry puffs are considered a favorite dessert in Greece, but Kontos Foods wanted to explore different ways of preparing the pastry puffs. To a chef, the pastry puffs are like a blank canvas, adaptable for sweet or savory fillings. Kontos also wanted a way to generate content and publicity around its brand image.

Kontos Foods Culinary Challenge #KFCC17: Fastlane reached out to The Culinary School at Eva’s Village to create a “Chopped”-style event in which the 27 students from the vocational cooking school would compete in a timed contest. The Culinary School at Eva’s Village is located around the corner from Kontos Foods in Paterson, N.J., so it was a natural partnership, enabling the students to test their skills with a professional food manufacturing company and its team of culinary experts.

Working with the pre-made Pastry Puffs, the student teams were asked to create two savory dishes and two sweet dishes. Fastlane coordinated with the staff at Eva’s Village to share social media posts and a Facebook Live stream during the event. Fastlane invited local media to the event, which resulted in six media pickups including a TV crew from Channel 12 and NorthJersey.com and in-depth coverage in the Paterson Times and 201 Magazine. A post-event press release was picked up by additional media outlets, and Kontos continued to work with the students in The Culinary School at Eva’s Village, presenting the entire class of graduates with Kontos Foods Culinary Challenge-branded Chef’s coats during their graduation ceremony in December. Fastlane shared all of these events on social media. The program was so successful that in November Kontos held a second Culinary Challenge with the Oakland Community College in Farmington Hills, Mich., in which two top winners were awarded $250 Visa gift cards. Again, Fastlane worked to get media pickup about the event through a post-event press release, pitching and a recipe release featuring one of the winning dessert recipes. The event also generated gorgeous food photography, showing off dishes made with the International Pastry Puffs.

“We’ve been very pleased working with Fastlane on the Kontos Foods Culinary Challenge,” said Warren Stoll, marketing director at Kontos Foods. “They hustled to get the word out about these two events and really accelerated our public relations this year.”

Headquartered in Durham, NC, Restoration and Recovery is the leading national provider of post construction stormwater management services across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. What began as a small business start-up, just one man and a landscaping truck, grew to a national powerhouse in less than 20 years, employing environmental engineers, project managers, regional managers and teams of stormwater management crews across the country.  However due to the growth, their brand image no longer reflected the true size and scope of their business – or convey their future ambitions.

With a name like “Restoration and Recovery” – clients often associated their service with emergency clean up or recovery efforts.

Fastlane was engaged to help rebrand Restoration and Recovery, helping to craft their collective company mission, vision and value – as well as their overall brand positioning platform.  We then translated that new “story architecture” into an effective, revised name, logo and brand identity.

Mission: Inspire change by preserving and protecting our most precious natural resource: water.

Vision: Foster a world with clean water, now and for future generations + inspire generations to forever protect our greatest natural resource: water.

Values: A team of enthusiastic and educated environmentalists dedicated to helping customers understand complicated stormwater management laws, avoid expensive violations and ensure the safety of our planet and all its inhabitants.

“Restoration and Recovery” was abbreviated to “R+R” – a short for their existing name that was already often used by employees, clients and partners throughout the country. Their tagline was also revised to emphasize their prominence as the only national provider in this industry: “The Stormwater Management Co.”

The new clean logo design also leveraged the aerial view of a stormwater management system and the imagery of a rain drop. The new primary and secondary color palette, font type and brand imagery were packaged together into a singular brand guidebook for use across the company.

“Kristi and Fastlane have helped our company tremendously. We found them to be very responsive, capable and a pleasure to work with. I would recommend them to anyone interested in improving their business.”

Michael Brewer – Vice President | Restoration and Recovery

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