THE CHALLENGE
Interface makes flooring for architects, designers and specifiers who can easily spot empty design claims. I turned detailed product thinking into distinctive creative language for the international launch of a new collection.
Interface is a global commercial flooring company with a formidable reputation for design and sustainability. Its products arrive with rich stories: materials, patterns, colours, performance and environmental circularity.
The danger is that all this detail produces copy that just catalogues features for an audience that’s already design literate. It doesn’t need telling products are beautiful, innovative or inspired by nature. It needs reasons to look again.
Interface’s Forest Within collection brought that challenge into sharp focus. It comprised four related carpet tile products that drew on birch bark, shifting seasons, and the effects of nature on how a space feels.
The client’s own initial language captured the subject well enough. But senior stakeholders wanted us to push harder: move away from the industry’s safe, predictable phrasing, and towards something bolder that would be more likely to start conversations.
THE SOLUTION
Working from product information, visual references and stakeholder feedback, I identified the creative tension at the collection’s core: nature isn’t always calm, tasteful or well behaved. It can be vivid, disruptive, impossible to ignore.
I developed and refined headlines, collection messaging, and individual product stories around this idea. Each product needed its own character, yet the four still had to feel like they belonged to a single collection.
Language had to make colour feel consequential. Show how pattern could transform spaces. Capture the connection between biophilic design and places people genuinely want to be in.
Rather than dilute the work as feedback became more demanding, I used each round to push language and concepts further. The words still had to explain what the flooring could do – but they also had to carry some of the energy visible in the product itself.
One of the simplest lines was also one of the most durable:
Seasonal energy, all year round.
THE OUTCOME
Forest Within launched internationally in 2026, making its physical debut at Chicago Design Week. The collection language now lives across Interface’s global website and product pages, as well as in the materials used by the sales team when pitching to clients.
That journey – from internal product material and exacting stakeholder feedback to public-facing international copy – shows the work I created survived a complex process.
Interface demanded we understand a technical B2B product, respect a highly design-literate audience, and still produce language with creative force.
Strategy mattered. Accuracy mattered. But so did writing something people might actually remember.