Assembly Video Case Study
How we created a custom assembly video that cut customer support calls by 50% and boosted sales by 25% in three months
The Ask
Inspire Fitness approached us with a dilemma— their multi-functional trainer, the SF3, is one of their most popular home fitness machines, selling millions worth in units every year, but the machine isn’t exactly easy to assemble. Every day their support staff would get bogged down by dozens, sometimes even hundreds of calls from customers asking questions pertaining to the assembly of the machine— anything from which screw they should be using, to where they should place the weight pad stickers. Once customers got the machine assembled, they absolutely loved it, they just had one key issue: the assembly wasn’t easy. So, they called us to help solve the problem.
After the recent success of two other videos we shot for Inspire Fitness (product demos of their CFT and FTE home fitness machines), and after a couple meetings including a long brainstorming session, we knew a specialized assembly video was the way to go. This video, however, needed to be different than your typical assembly video:
This video needed to cater to customers with little to no experience assembling fitness equipment.
All the information needed to be in one place, because no one likes digging for information, and the only resource customers would likely have would be their cell phone. That meant the video would be long, but no one likes a long video, so we needed to think of a way to keep the information organized, engaging, and easy-to-sort through.
This video needed to be unique to Inspire Fitness, meaning heavily branded, dripping with tone, and fun! Inspire was big on not creating your typically stuffy assembly video, so we had our work cut out for us.
The Process
The first step for us, as always, was education—we needed to learn as much as possible about the SF3 if we were going to teach others how to assemble it. We started by meeting the senior marketing staff to learn about all of the exciting features of the product and how Inspire Fitness talked about them, but we figured out early on that we needed to dive deeper—customers needed a thorough overview of the individual parts, how they fit together, and how the machine could be adjusted to fit their personal needs. So, we set up 4 one-hour meetings with the CTO and Lead Engineer to learn about all of the technical aspects of the unit. Again, this video was going to be long, how long—16 pages of technical voiceover to be exact (for comparison, the average video is closer to 3 pages)! We also needed to leave room in the script to re-record portions where we discovered little tricks from the expert assemblers that made building the unit easier. We got right to work, and two weeks later we had a flexible, modularized script that would guide the shoot.
During the two weeks it took to write the script, we ran through the pre-production process simultaneously. We identified our talent (two of Inspire Fitness’s own expert assemblers), picked a shooting location (Inspire HQ on a white stage, which we helped art direct), picked our shoot dates (two consecutive shoot days), gathered our equipment and we were ready to go.
With proper planning, a production should be as smooth as butter and our two-day shoot was just that! Both production days were 9 hours each which allowed us to capture footage and simultaneously adjust the script as needed when we discovered little tricks that made the assembly easier (shout-out to Herbert and Adriel for identifying expert tips and shout-out to Lacey who tracked the changes while we shot).
With hundreds of gigabytes of footage in hand, we were ready to begin the edit. We decided to begin the video with not just an overview of the safety warnings and the machine itself, but of all the individual parts required for the entire assembly. Starting the video with a full package overview allowed us to divide the video into clear steps, complete with their own screens, graphics, and part lists. This kept the video organized and gave users the option to skip through the video using timestamps on YouTube to find the sections they needed to complete the assembly. With a rough version of the voice over and the steps as our guide, we began from the very beginning, editing the steps together as shot on set. We used jump cuts and time lapse footage throughout the edit to keep the video kinetic, ensuring each step was clear but never lingered on screen too long (who needs to watch someone screw in a bolt for 2 minutes?!). We added a high-energy soundtrack and before long, we had a surprisingly entertaining cut to share with the client.
After receiving a handful of notes and making some adjustments, it was time to polish the video which meant color correcting, color grading, and adding the final voice over, which we coordinated recorded ourselves. And the final step: animation and VFX.
Inspire Fitness wanted to keep the animations simple—they needed graphics that called attention to specific areas of the machine and made certain steps easier to understand, but didn’t distract from the instructions or take away from the machine itself. We settled on a simple visual style that included branded arrows, circles, and callouts that guided the viewer but didn’t call too much attention to themselves. As far as VFX, a simple digital lengthening of the white stage was all we needed to make it feel like a futuristic white expanse.
The Results
When everything was said and done, the SF3 assembly video clocked in at 22 minutes and was jam-packed with a step-by-step assembly guide that was easy to understand and fun to watch. Inspire Fitness was thrilled with the video and the customers were even happier. Days after delivery, the video went up on the Inspire Fitness website, their YouTube page, the SF3 product page on Costco.com and received immediate critical acclaim. The video has been viewed on YouTube more than 11,000 times and tens of thousands of times on Costco.com
According to Inspire Fitness, three months after the posting of the video, technical support calls for the SF3 dropped 50% and sales of the SF3 increased by 25%. With the unit costing $4,500 and the video being viewed over 23,000 times across all platforms, it’s easy to see why the Inspire Fitness team was very happy with the video. Shortly after the positive numbers came in, Inspire Fitness ordered assembly videos for 4 other units and there is an on-going discussion about creating assembly videos for all of their other home fitness machines. To this day, Inspire Fitness remains one of our happiest and most frequent customers.
Do you have a product that you think could benefit from an assembly video? Shoot us an email and we’d be happy to discuss how we can best be of service!