Turning a facade-wood spec sheet into copy people call about.
EXZO is a Belgian outdoor building-materials retailer. I was brought in to rewrite their barnwood facade cladding and cor-ten steel garden accessories — planters, fire bowls, and similar pieces. The copy didn't resonate with who prospective buyers were; EXZO's clients were both professionals and regular consumers. The texts had to be persuasive, yet informative. The perfect balance was found through simple, vivid, and colorful texts about how this specific type of wood could elevate a living space.
A colour code doesn't tell a story. A place does. Renaming the line by origin turned a swatch into a scene — a plank that stood on a Canadian barn for a century before it ever reached a Belgian façade.
Instead of leading with thickness and finish, the rewritten pages open with where the wood actually comes from — old barns and former railway sleepers, weathered by decades of Canadian winters. Every knot, scratch, and colour shift became part of that history instead of a flaw to apologize for.
Barnwood: hout met een verhaal.Barnwood: wood with a story.
Before the rewrite, the barnwood pages barely got a second look. After launch, EXZO started fielding calls from people asking specifically about the Toronto line — the first time this product had prompted a phone call instead of a bounce.
Delivered in 2018 — the Toronto naming, the "wood with a story" positioning, as well as texts for hundreds of other products, are still live on EXZO's site today.