Repositioning LivingPaper

LivingPaper makes handcrafted seed paper. Growth had stalled in a segment where it was one of many undifferentiated suppliers, and the engagement lost its Project Manager with 6 weeks left on an 8-week timeline.

Two questions had to be answered at once: where the company could actually win, and how four workstreams already in motion would be brought to a single recommendation on time.

I took over as Project Manager and reset the plan around the deliverable rather than the workplan. Each of the 4 workstreams was given one output and one owner, with a fixed weekly integration point.

The analytical spine was a competitor benchmark wide enough to say something definitive about saturation, then a search for demand the incumbents were not serving.

55 competitors benchmarked. The seed paper market was saturated around three use cases: weddings, greeting cards and corporate gifting. Positioning, price and craft claims were close to indistinguishable across them.

The funeral market was the exception. Demand for handcrafted, meaningful paper existed, competition was thin, and the client already held relationships through the National Association of Funeral Directors.

Existing distribution relationships were the deciding factor. Without them the recommendation would have required a channel build the client could not fund.

Reposition toward premium handcrafted seed paper for the funeral market, routed through the existing National Association of Funeral Directors relationships.

Delivered as a go-to-market and pricing strategy: segment definition, channel plan, price architecture for a premium tier, and the sequence for testing it before committing capacity.

The repositioning and pricing strategy was delivered as the final recommendation on the original 8-week timeline.

Client-side commercial results after handover: [TBC].