AUTOMOTIVE SOLUTIONS / CASE STUDY
Twenty-five years, on a single shelf
Editorial Direction · Content Strategy · Design Brief · Project Lead
The brief: An anniversary book
The brief arrived in a single sentence: we need a book to mark our 25th anniversary.
Automotive Solutions is a membership network of 65 independent automotive businesses spread across New Zealand, and its leadership team knew that 25 years deserved more than a ceremony. What that should look like on the page, and how to get there, was the part nobody had answered yet.
The real challenge
A commemorative anniversary book lives or dies on its stories, and these stories could only come from the members themselves.
That made the raw material both the strength of the project and its biggest risk. Member-sourced content arrives uneven by nature, so PJC built a questionnaire with a set of considered questions designed to draw out more than names and dates.
Some members answered generously, in long and vivid detail. Others offered a few lines. Every one of them had earned a place in the book, which meant the real work was holding a profile built from three sentences to the same standard as one built from three pages.
The approach
Every current and past member of the organisation was invited to take a page. Each submission was read for what it suggested as much as for what it said. A passing comment about fitting in became a story about belonging. A first regional meeting became the start of a professional relationship that had lasted decades. The facts stayed exactly as members had given them while the storytelling did the lifting.
Each profile was shaped to a consistent length, around 250 words, and carried a natural arc - from how a member first found the organisation through to where they stood at the milestone. The tone stayed warm without tipping into sentiment. The structure gave everyone equal weight on the page, whether they had written three paragraphs or three lines.
Alongside the editorial work, PJC wrote the design brief for Kylie at kaz, setting the tone, hierarchy and standards before the first profile was placed. The brief held to one principle above all: equal weight for every member, whatever they had sent. Every member page followed the same format, so a profile built from three lines carried the same dignity as one built from three pages. The editing carried it in the words; the design carried it on the page. One direction, from the brief through to the final layout.
The brief was a single sentence.
Every submission deserved a page.
The outcome
The anniversary book went to print with more than 50 member profiles - every response included, none diminished by the limits of what its author had sent. Founding members were given their own place, and every member, past and present, appeared in the timeline at the back.
But the real story was the one that surfaced as the pages came together. Read end to end, the profiles told of camaraderie and friendships formed over years, and of how much this network had come to mean to the people in it. A common thread ran through almost every page: the independent workshop owner who had once solved every problem alone now had a roomful of fellow professionals to call on. The book set out to mark 25 years of keeping cars on the road. What it captured was an organisation whose real value was its people, and the quiet way they had come to rely on one another.
At the 25th anniversary dinner in Wellington, a copy was placed in the hands of every person in the room.
"In the early days you fixed your own problems, because there was no one to ask. Twenty-five years on, that's the last thing any of us has to do.
Pippa took fifty-odd profiles and found what runs through all of them - how far we've come, and the people who got us there. A history well written to be treasured."
Peter Morton, founding member, Automotive Solutions
Considering a similar partnership?
This is the kind of editorial work PJC was built on.
If you have a company milestone that calls for a commemorative publication, or a project that needs one person holding the strategic and creative thread from beginning to end, get in touch.
The members built the network.
The book showed them what it had become.
A network is more than a list of names.
It's the people who answer when you call.
