Company: Elite Earth-friendly Cleaners,, Victoria, BC, Canada

Company Description: Elite Earth-friendly Cleaners is Victoria's only solvent-free drycleaner, using citrus, soy and banana cleaning agents in a water-based process. Elite went "green" in 2003, and since then has won several local, provincial and national environmental awards, and has been featured in the national press.

Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories

Nomination Sub Category: Best Creative Person

Nomination Title: Chelsea Chenery, all around creative genius

   1. Tell the story about what this nominee achieved in the past year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

When Elite Earth-friendly Cleaners wanted to break into the wedding gown market, Chelsea led us in creating an upscale corporate image and materials to give out at bridal fairs.  She is an all-round creative genius!

Chelsea created our "Nasty Surprise" campaign, which featured a "shocked bride", and explained how brides could "Avoid a nasty surprise" by bringing their precious gown to us for cleaning and preservation. http://www.greendrycleaner.com/pdf/Nasty_Surprise_brochure.pdf This was an entirely unique take in the wedding gown industry, where most companies use rather sappy emotionally charged material that gets tired very quickly at bridal fairs.

Chelsea set up our bridal fair booths to display what we do and to set us apart from the other offerings at bridal fairs. Instead of simply showing preserved gowns in boxes, Chelsea had us suspend a gorgeous gown from the ceiling, spilling into a box on a table.  She suggested that we do boxing demonstrations at the bridal fairs to set ourselves up as the experts, to raise our profile among the hundreds of advertisers and to invite questions at our booth (hence, bringing customers to our booth).  Chelsea created a huge "shocked bride" poster (which goes on stage during the boxing demo, and stops people in their

tracks at our booth), brochures, coupons, and website features and testimonials, and set up our store front window to match.  http://www.greendrycleaner.com/wedding_gowns.htm#bailey

Brides in our community now instantly recognize when they pass our storefront that we are the experts whom they met at the bridal fairs.  Our display window features our shocked bride poster, the dress hung from the ceiling spilling into a box and several boxed gowns – all the stuff they saw at our booth in the bridal fair.)  We went from cleaning one gown a year to cleaning hundreds, thanks to Chelsea's great ideas and guerilla tactics.  Several other members of the International Association of Wedding Gown Specialists, a professional association to which we belong, have asked to “borrow” our shocked bride

designs and ideas.

Chelsea’s creativity doesn’t end with one campaign.  She worked with our graphics designer to create all our brochures http://www.greendrycleaner.com/pdf/elite_brochure.pdf – she chose the design layout, wrote the copy, and worked with our website designer to make sure all our materials represented us well.  With our very tiny advertising budget, she made us look like a very large, very successful corporate giant, with a gorgeous website http://www.greendrycleaner.com, fabulous brochures and exciting display windows.

The most amazing aspect of this story is that Chelsea managed to do all this on her “off time”, as she worked full-time as the cleaner in our very tiny family business of only three employees.  Her creative genius is that she is good at not just one particular discipline, but able to “do it all”, from design layout, to copy-writing, to website design, to window displays, to concept work.

   2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, http://www.youraddress.com:

http://www.greendrycleaner.com

http://www.greendrycleaner.com/pdf/Nasty_Surprise_brochure.pdf

http://www.greendrycleaner.com/pdf/elite_brochure.pdf

   3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about this nominee:

At 24, Chelsea has worked for a community newspaper and a local magazine prior to joining the family business as cleaner and creative genius.  She is a regular contributor to an on-line magazine for the arts, as well as a freelance contributor to several local publications.  In addition to her creativity in the corporate realm, Chelsea is a singer-songwriter, poet and soon-to-be mother. Chelsea has always been a fearless, passionate citizen of the world.  In 1999, she celebrated her 18th birthday while working in refugee camps in the very unstable political climate of Tirana, Albania.