Seller Stories Documentaries

Over the course of 8 years, Mew has partnered with teams across Amazon to capture interviews with Amazon sellers from all over the country from Seattle to Miami and everywhere in between. One set of interviews turned into multiple marketing campaigns, over 100 interviews, and turned Mew into a preferred video vendor across Amazon teams in the US and Canada.

Bright light city...

As many good stories do, this one starts in Vegas. Mew Studios has been a preferred Amazon partner agency since we flew the crew down to Las Vegas to capture testimonies of folks who sell their products on Amazon. People had come from all over the country to attend a conference and we rented out a suite at the Aria Resort to turn into a video studio. We brought in multiple cameras, lighting kits, grip and support, and enough production design props to fill a couple big suitcases (shout out to the Aria security for letting us use the freight elevator!).

We turned that series of interviews (it was something like 20 of ‘em over the course of 2 days!) into what would be the beginning of the Day One: Stories of Entrepreneurship series that’s still being added to today, with interviews from sellers in Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Raleigh, Vancouver, Quebec, and Calgary.

That ended up being a fantastic template template: when there was a group of subjects in one location (like that first conference), we worked with the Amazon team to develop a bulletproof schedule and timeline to batch capture as many interviews as possible. The client loved it because we were able to get a heckuvalot™ of content jam-packed into a smaller number of days on set—super efficient.

Adding in Backstory

But there was a struggle with the edits: so many of these subjects had great origin stories—like Andres from Argentina who was in a rock band before he started his entrepreneurial journey—but we can’t really go back in time to get footage of him rocking out to hair metal. So we turned Andres into a cartoon.

These were great bite-sized content pieces. We found that a lot of viewer interaction came in the first 90 seconds of a video like this, so we doubled-down and ended up making dozens of these for a whole unified campaign.

But the Amazon team saw an opportunity for some longer documentary pieces, too. They identified a few subjects that we could stay with for an additional few days to tell a bit more of the sellers’ journeys: additional interviews with their family and business partners, footage of their production process and facility, and even some of their hobbies. It made for a really well-rounded look at the subject and really personified the Amazon brand.

That’s Dallas

We flew to Dallas to capture the story of Desert Creek Honey, a company with millions of employees (most of them bees) that farms and sells raw, unfiltered (and delicious) honey in the Amazon store. We zipped into full-body beekeeping suits in 100° Texas heat to capture the inner workings of a bee farm with a super high-speed Phantom Flex4k camera capturing a thousand frames a second to slow down the bee wings in flight. It got so hot that we had to strap ice packs around the camera to keep it from overheating. From there we captured the process from hive to bottle, some additional interviews with family and friends, and gorgeous b-roll of the Texas landscape.

Welcome to Miami

We traded in bee suits for swim suits when we flew to Miami to capture some more amazing stories. One of these was HomEco, a brand selling eco-friendly home goods in the Amazon store. A small startup, the owners (husband/wife Brad & Kara) try to keep the company lean and mobile, so they can cruise around the world on their boat with their two kids. So we jumped onboard, loaded up our gear, and prayed for calm seas. We fit a full crew and all the gear into the boat’s cabin for the interview, got some slow-mo footage of the waves on the hull, and put a drone into the air. And then the director wanted the money shot: get the camera in the water. So we fashioned a tether safety line from the family boat to the camera team’s chase boat, hooked our camera operator up to the line (listen: it was his idea!) and bagged up the camera in a waterproof housing. Now securely attached to the line, the cam op (with considerable upper-body strength!) was able to hold steady in the 15mph current and get the shot: the family jumping into the aqua blue waters of Miami.