For nearly three decades, The Corporate Source nonprofit has built meaningful work for people with disabilities, placing teams across federal buildings, state offices, and facilities up and down the East Coast. In 2026, the organization took a new name: Fora.
The mission held; the identity changed. A rebrand of that scale is not a simple logo swap – it is a public promise that everything underneath the new word still holds. Video production sat at the center of that promise, because the new brand needed a face, a voice, and a library of versatile visual assets before it could launch. The question was whether one shoot day could deliver all of it.
Fora carried relationships dating back to 1996 and partnerships measured in hundreds of thousands of service hours a year. That history raised the bar rather than lowering it. The new identity had to honor decades of trust while signaling growth to the federal and enterprise clients who depend on the organization each day.
First, the rebrand needed an anthem film authentic enough to show real employees on screen – not actors – and polished enough to perform for a demanding business audience. Second, the new website and social presence needed a deep well of supporting assets, from video clips to headshots, ready the moment the new brand went live. Third, a nonprofit, mission-driven organization sets every dollar against program impact, so the production had to deliver enterprise-grade quality on a budget built for stewardship.
The deeper task ran underneath all of it. This rebrand video production had to tell a workforce-inclusion story with dignity, keeping Fora’s people at the center as true subjects of the story. Get that wrong and the rebrand reads as performance. Get it right and the rebrand reads as promise.
Cardboard Spaceship treated this as the visual foundation of an entire rebrand, not just a single video. Every decision traced back to one goal: hand Fora and its PR partner, co:collective, more than they came in expecting, so the new brand had room to grow.
We partnered with the PR firm, co:collective, to sharpen the story before a single frame hit the screen.
-Evaluated the initial script alongside co:collective and reshaped it into the strongest possible shootable asset rather than executing a handed-down draft.
-Translated the PR firm’s visual vision for the rebrand into a concrete production plan, mapping every beat of the anthem to footage we knew we could capture in the time available.
-Anchored the narrative in real employee voices, choosing authenticity over polish so the inclusion mission read as genuine.
-Aligned creative direction across two organizations – client and agency – so everyone shot toward the same finished brand.
A one-day shoot left no room for missed opportunities, so we engineered the day to capture maximum range.
-Designed a two-team production model, running a dedicated interview unit and a separate B-roll unit in parallel to multiply what one day could yield.
-Brought in a director beyond the original scope to protect the creative vision and keep both units moving toward one cohesive story.
-Added a secondary shooting team beyond the original scope, expanding coverage so the asset library would outlast the launch.
-Built the schedule to capture five employee interviews, B-roll across fifteen employees, and headshots for roughly twenty more in a single coordinated day.
We planned the shoot to keep working long after the brand went live.
-Identified every downstream use – website, social, print, recruiting – and shot deliberately to feed all of them from one production.
-Captured a full still-photography set alongside the motion work so the rebrand launched with consistent imagery across every channel.
-Structured the footage so Fora and co:collective could pull clips for ongoing content without returning to set.
The day ran on two tracks at once. One camera team held the interview space, drawing out five employees as they talked about their work and what it meant to them. A second team moved through Fora’s environments, gathering B-roll of fifteen employees on the job – the texture that turns a talking head into a story. A stills photographer worked the same hours, capturing the shoot and building out headshots for roughly twenty additional team members along the way.
Running parallel units in one day demanded constant coordination. The added director and secondary team, neither in the original scope, turned a tight schedule into an advantage, letting us capture range that a single crew could never reach before the light ran out. We kept the bar high on every frame, because we knew the footage would feed a website and a brand identity, not just a video.
From planning to playback, post-production carried the same intent. We edited the long-form video content and handled everything on screen ourselves – color correction, VFX, graphics, and motion design. Then we delivered the full library: color-corrected hero footage, all additional raw footage for future social content, and the complete set of stills and headshots, ready for Fora to use anywhere.
When we became Fora, we needed a production partner that could move quickly without compromising quality. We had just one day to capture everything we needed to launch our new brand. Cardboard Spaceship came prepared, allowing us to film five executive interviews, capture B-roll with fifteen team members, and photograph another twenty employees – all in a single day. It was an ambitious schedule, but their team made the entire process feel seamless. The final work didn’t just document our rebrand; it brought our new identity to life and gave us a powerful way to tell our story.
The work did exactly what a rebrand needs its visuals to do: it launched the fresh look – and kept giving. The Corporate Source became Fora, and the anthem film now anchors the story across Fora’s content ecosystem, carrying the transition forward.
The assets reached further than the film. co:collective built the launch around what we delivered, and the rebranded website reflects Cardboard Spaceship’s work – the hero video and team photography that greet every visitor came out of that single shoot day. By shooting for the whole rebrand rather than one deliverable, we gave Fora a library deep enough to support ongoing content and strategy well past launch, without a return trip to set.
That is the real measure here. A mission-driven organization invested carefully and walked away with enterprise-grade craft, a launched identity, and a reusable foundation for everything that comes next. The nonprofit rebrand video production did not just mark the moment Fora arrived – it gave Fora the material to keep telling its story.
A new name is only as strong as the story and assets behind it. If you are planning a rebrand and want video that launches the brand and keeps working long after, let’s talk about yours.
Victoria’s Secret & Co. went into its 2026 Annual Meeting facing a contested vote – and a proxy defense that would succeed or fail based on how clearly shareholders understood the board’s case. BBRC International, a shareholder holding roughly 13% of the company’s common stock, had launched a campaign against the re-election of Independent Chair Donna James and director Mariam Naficy. The board needed to make a complex case clearly, quickly, and credibly: why shareholders should support its nominees, its leadership, and the Path to Potential strategy already underway.
VS&Co had a substantial response: a turnaround strategy, recent performance momentum, a qualified board, and a documented history of engagement. What it needed was one disciplined digital home where shareholders, analysts, media, advisors, and proxy decision-makers could evaluate that case before voting.
That’s where we come in. Alongside the talented team at Edelman Smithfield, Cardboard Spaceship built the Path to Potential proxy defense website – bringing together narrative strategy, investor relations website development, intuitive design, director video production, shareholder resources, and compliance-aware execution under a deadline that left no room for drift.
When it comes to timelines, a contested vote compresses everything. Materials move quickly. Arguments change. Legal review is constant. Shareholders need the facts in one place, but every word has to hold up under scrutiny.
For VS&Co, the issue was not a lack of substance. The board had a multi-year turnaround story, triple-digit shareholder returns under a new CEO, and a documented history of engagement with the activist. But that evidence sat scattered across SEC filings, earnings calls, and press releases that spoke the language of compliance, not persuasion. The problem was fragmentation.
The website had to turn that scattered record into a clear shareholder experience. It needed to:
One constraint shaped every decision: time. The site had to launch inside a narrow pre-meeting window, survive legal and IR review, and stay current as new filings and letters moved through an active contest. Investor relations website development rarely runs on a campaign clock. This one did.
To meet the timeline, the work could not move in a straight line. Strategy, design, content, video production, development, sourcing, and review had to run in parallel. Cardboard Spaceship organized the build around five connected workstreams.
The site needed to advocate without sounding defensive. We structured the experience around the board’s affirmative case first: progress, performance, strategy, and governance.
Rather than opening with the activist’s claims, the site led with value creation and Path to Potential momentum. Shareholders could quickly see the strategic pillars behind the turnaround, the board overseeing that work, and the reasons VS&Co was asking them to vote the WHITE proxy card.
– Led with a value-creation data layer – total shareholder return since the CEO transition, benchmarked against the analyst peer set and major indices – so the board’s case opened on results, not rebuttal.
– Structured the Path to Potential strategy into four scannable proof points (bra authority, PINK, beauty, brand projection), each tied to a concrete result a shareholder could verify.
– Reframed the years of activist engagement as a documented timeline running from 2021 through the campaign launch – a decision that let the facts carry the argument.
– Kept the voting action consistent throughout the site: vote the WHITE card for all nine nominees ahead of June 11.
This made the site useful for different levels of attention. A busy investor could understand the case in minutes. A detail-oriented analyst could dig into the supporting materials.
Most proxy microsites look like legal documents. This one had to do more. It needed the credibility of an investor relations site and the visual confidence of the brand it was defending.
Cardboard Spaceship integrated Victoria’s Secret & Co. campaign photography, brand assets, and a clean digital system that could carry dense governance and financial content without feeling crowded. The design gave shareholders a polished, current experience while keeping the information architecture practical.
– Integrated Victoria’s Secret campaign photography directly into the experience, so the brand creating that value also framed it.
– Designed responsive layouts for institutional and retail shareholders across desktop and mobile.
– Built the nine director nominees as expandable bio modals, keeping the experience clean while preserving depth.
– Engineered a clear hierarchy for performance data, source notes, shareholder letters, filings, and voting instructions.
The result was not decoration. It was investor relations website development with brand discipline: sharp enough for the moment, restrained enough for scrutiny.
In a proxy defense, written credentials matter. But hearing board members speak directly can do something a bio cannot: create immediacy, accountability, and trust. So, our corporate video production team built that proof into the site.
Cardboard Spaceship produced direct-to-camera messages from key directors, including Independent Chair Donna James and committee chairs Irene Chang Britt and Anne Sheehan. The production moved across Florida, Ohio, and Barcelona, allowing directors to participate from where they were rather than forcing the campaign schedule around a single location. The videos were built for how investors actually watch: concise, focused, and embedded in the site where they could support the broader case.
– Produced direct-to-camera messages from key board members, including Chair Donna James and committee chairs Irene Chang Britt and Anne Sheehan.
– Filmed across three locations on two continents – Florida, Ohio, and Barcelona – capturing directors on their own schedules rather than bending the production to a single set.
– Embedded the messages into a dedicated module so shareholders could hear the strategy from the people accountable for it.
– Kept each message short and substantive – minutes, not monologues – to match how busy investors actually watch.
A proxy defense website is not a normal marketing asset. Every statistic, phrase, chart, and voting instruction may be reviewed by legal teams, advisors, shareholders, reporters, and the activist itself.
The build was structured accordingly. Performance figures were sourced and dated. Footnotes were treated as part of the user experience, not an afterthought. Review cycles were folded into production rather than saved for the end.
The site also used a strictly necessary cookies posture, with no analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies. For a shareholder-facing asset under regulatory scrutiny, that was a deliberate privacy and compliance choice.
– Sourced every performance figure with dated, footnoted attribution (FactSet, company filings), so no one could challenge a data point as unsupported.
– Implemented a strictly-necessary-cookies posture – no analytics, advertising, or tracking – a deliberate privacy and compliance call for a shareholder-facing asset under regulatory scrutiny.
– Folded legal and IR review into the production cycle instead of bolting it on at the end, so a compressed timeline never became a compliance risk.
– Chose a technical approach that prioritized launch speed, stability, and client-side update control.
The launch was only the first deadline. During an active contest, the site needed to keep pace with new filings, investor materials, shareholder letters, and campaign updates.
Cardboard Spaceship maintained the News & Resources area as the campaign’s digital source of truth, giving stakeholders one place to find the latest materials. As the vote approached, the site could evolve without losing structure.
– Maintained a News & Resources hub as the single source of truth for filings, letters, and shareholder materials.
– Pushed updates live as the campaign progressed toward the June 11 meeting, so the site never lagged the contest.
– Managed the asset through the vote, freeing the IR and comms teams to focus on direct shareholder outreach.
The hardest part never shows up on the page. The public sees a polished site. Behind it is a compressed schedule, a moving legal review process, a live campaign, and a large group of stakeholders who all need the asset to be accurate, persuasive, and ready at the same time. It is a live argument on a fixed deadline – lawyers comb every line, and the people reading it decide who leads the company.
For Path to Potential, production moved on parallel tracks. To put the board on camera, CBS filmed director messages across three locations on two continents – Florida, Ohio, and Barcelona – capturing each director where they were rather than bending the schedule to a single set. Those messages fed a site where design, narrative, data sourcing, and legal review all advanced at once. We sourced and dated every performance claim before it shipped. Every page had to render cleanly on the phone of an institutional investor checking it between meetings.
That coordination mattered. The website needed to feel considered, not rushed. It had to give shareholders a clear view of the board’s argument, the company’s strategy, the director nominees, the voting process, and the supporting materials without burying them in a document library. That is the difference between a website for proxy contest defense and a real shareholder communications platform. One hosts information. The other helps the right audience understand what is at stake and what to do next.
On June 11, 2026, Victoria’s Secret & Co. shareholders re-elected all nine of the board’s director nominees. They returned Independent Chair Donna James with over 99% of votes cast excluding the activist’s shares – and over 83% of all votes cast. The board’s other nominees cleared comparable margins, receiving at least 96% support excluding BBRC votes, or at least 81% of all votes cast.
Immediate Impact: The company called the result a decisive statement of shareholder support for its board leadership and the Path to Potential strategy – the exact case the site existed to make.
Measurable Outcome: A near-unanimous re-election (excluding the dissident block) against an organized “vote no” campaign from a roughly 13% holder.
Lasting Value: The work stands as a repeatable model – a digital backbone for high-stakes shareholder communications and investor days that brings strategy, brand creative, and compliant execution under one roof. The clearest proof that the proxy defense website development did its job: the board it defended won, decisively.
For VS&Co, the outcome was a clear public endorsement of the board, its leadership, and the Path to Potential strategy. For Cardboard Spaceship, the project showed what high-stakes investor communications can look like when strategy, design, video, development, and compliance all move together. One credible, branded, easy-to-navigate destination for the case shareholders needed to evaluate.
The strongest defenses take shape before the campaign starts – a clear, credible place for shareholders to review the case. We help boards, IR teams, communications advisors, and legal stakeholders create clear, credible digital experiences for the moments when the stakes and the timeline leave no margin – and when every detail matters.
Let’s talk about your proxy defense →
The New York Stock Exchange doesn’t need an introduction. For Masco Corporation’s 2026 Investor Day – the company’s first in nearly a decade – it was the right room: prestigious, resonant, weighted with meaning for the analyst and shareholder audience walking through the door. But a great room doesn’t automatically equal a great event. Investor day production at the NYSE comes wrapped in a standardized production framework that serves hundreds of companies a year. That framework is professional. It also lacks the personalization a brand-led investor day requires. The work Cardboard Spaceship delivered closed that gap – as the full-service investor day production company accountable for every layer of the day.
The NYSE is one of the most recognized venues in the world for investor-facing events – and that recognition cuts both ways. The in-house production infrastructure runs reliably, efficiently, and consistently. It also operates, by design, as a template. A venue at that scale can’t reconfigure for every company that walks through its doors. That isn’t a failure of the NYSE. It’s the nature of the offering.
For Masco, that ceiling was the problem. The investor day audience – analysts and shareholders with high expectations – would walk into a room they’d likely seen before, in a format they’d experienced a hundred times. The visual language, the flow, the feel of the event all risked blending into the backdrop of every other investor day held in that same space.
On top of the brand differentiation challenge, Masco needed to serve a simultaneous virtual audience at the same level of professionalism as the room – without the bloated platform costs that typically come with that requirement. And they needed a single, trusted point of contact across multiple production teams, the NYSE’s internal AV operation, and their own executive team – in a venue and format where miscommunication carries real consequences. The ask: elevate the production across the board, and ease the burden on Masco’s IR team.
Most production companies build investor days as a stack of separate workstreams – one vendor handles the webcast, another the deck, a third the microsite, a fourth the venue graphics. CBSS built Masco’s day as a connected system, with one team accountable for the entire production – the strategy-through-execution model the company runs on. Masco partnered with Arbor Advisory Group as its strategic IR consultancy. Arbor led the investor relations strategy. Cardboard Spaceship built and ran the production system that delivered it. Below is how that system came together.
Before making a single creative decision, we looked at where the budget was going – and where it didn’t need to go. Investor day production budgets often lock into vendor assumptions no one has pressure-tested. We pressure-tested them.
– Audited the existing webcast platform specification against the actual virtual production requirements for this event.
– Identified an alternative platform that met every technical and audience-facing requirement at significantly lower cost.
– Recovered $13,000 in immediate savings – funds we reinvested directly into branded production upgrades rather than returned to the budget.
– Reallocated the recovered budget across LED visual design, microsite development, and executive support, scaling the event’s production value with minimal net out-of-pocket increase.
– Established cost reengineering as a first-phase discipline, not an afterthought – making every approved dollar on this investor day production work as hard as possible.
Understanding the venue before committing to a creative plan is non-negotiable on a project like this. The NYSE has its own infrastructure, its own AV team, its own operational rhythm. Our job was to understand exactly where that infrastructure ended and our work began.
– Conducted a full site walkthrough with the production lead and lead designer to assess in-house capabilities, spatial opportunities, and technical constraints.
– Mapped every visual touchpoint in the room – entry, main hall, food and welcome area, podium – to find where branded design would have the highest audience impact.
– Identified the executive team’s need for prompter support during the walkthrough and designed a dedicated prompter system tailored to the space and their presentation style.
– Built a detailed run of show in coordination with the NYSE’s internal teams, setting clear handoff points and communication protocols across all production partners.
– Used walkthrough findings to shape the full visual design plan before any asset entered production, eliminating costly revisions downstream.
The NYSE stage belongs to every company that books it. Making it feel like Masco’s required a deliberate, comprehensive approach to branded environment design – every surface a signal, every visual element reinforcing the narrative before an executive said a word. This kind of build sits inside CBS’s full-service design studio practice.
– Designed and produced LED totem graphics, an LED entry screen, and LED exit screens to establish brand presence from the moment guests arrived through the walk-out as they exited the building.
– Created custom window treatments for two windows in the welcome and food area and five windows in the main event room, extending the branded environment beyond the stage.
– Developed a custom podium panel design that centered Masco’s identity at the literal focal point of every presentation moment.
– Designed branded lanyards and badge graphics to carry visual consistency through every attendee touchpoint.
– Coordinated all design assets with the NYSE’s technical specifications and installation requirements, integrating seamlessly with in-house systems.
An investor day is only as strong as the executives on stage. The most precise production in the world doesn’t compensate for a leadership team that isn’t ready. We built the support structure around them – starting earlier than most production partners do.
– Deployed virtual prompter support the week before on-site rehearsals, letting the executive team work with live scripted content in a low-pressure environment before arriving at the NYSE.
– Built a custom prompter system configured to the specific presentation format and executive preferences identified during the site walkthrough.
– Structured the rehearsal day to integrate prompter operation, live AV coordination, and virtual production testing simultaneously – rehearsing no element in isolation.
– Served as the executive team’s single point of contact for all production-related preparation, reducing the number of stakeholders they had to manage in the lead-up to the event.
Serving a room and serving a screen at the same time is a different discipline than most live event productions are built for. The virtual audience for this investor day production required its own dedicated infrastructure, management layer, and quality standard – running in parallel with everything happening on the floor.
– Built and launched a custom microsite to serve as the virtual audience’s primary access point and event hub.
– Managed all virtual event hosting through the alternative platform identified during the cost audit, delivering broadcast-quality output at a fraction of the original platform cost.
– Deployed an off-site tech producer dedicated exclusively to virtual event management across rehearsal day and event day.
– Integrated virtual production cues, timing, and content delivery into the master run of show, keeping the on-site and virtual experiences synchronized throughout.
– Managed 70+ registered virtual attendees in real time during the live event, holding the same operational precision we applied to the room.
I want to again extend our sincere thanks to the Cardboard Spaceship team for your contributions to making our Investor Day such a success. From the high-quality materials, seamless run of show and overall experience, your team’s efforts ensured that we delivered a compelling and polished event that reflected extremely well on our company. We truly appreciate the commitment, flexibility, and teamwork that made this happen.
Investor days at the NYSE move fast and leave little room for improvisation. By the time the event began, the team had tested every system, installed and cleared every visual asset, and aligned every production partner – in-house NYSE AV, the virtual production crew, the on-site production team – around the same run of show.
The week before the event, the executive team ran live prompter sessions remotely, arriving on rehearsal day already familiar with the scripted flow. That headstart makes a measurable difference. Rehearsal day ran as a systems check rather than a first read-through. The kind of stress that accumulates in the final 48 hours of a high-stakes investor day dropped sharply because the preparation started earlier and ran deeper than the standard NYSE playbook.
On event day, the branded environment came fully alive: LED totems and entry screens framed the arrival experience, custom window treatments transformed the ambient spaces, and the podium panel centered Masco’s identity at the focal point of every presentation moment. Simultaneously, 70+ virtual registrants joined a dedicated broadcast stream that an off-site tech producer ran in lockstep with the live event.
The coordination across multiple production teams – NYSE operations, on-site crew, virtual production, and the executive team itself – ran without a visible seam. That seamlessness is the work. It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the only acceptable register for high-end investor day production, and the day reflected it.
The most immediate result was financial: $13,000 we recovered through platform reengineering, reinvested into the production rather than left on the table. That single decision funded the branded visual upgrades, the microsite, and the enhanced executive support – production value the event would not otherwise have had.
On the day, more than 70 virtual registrants joined a broadcast-quality stream that ran in full synchronization with the live event at the NYSE. The on-site experience delivered a branded environment that felt specific to Masco – not generic to the venue.
Beyond the room, the day moved analyst coverage. In the days surrounding the event, Wall Street price targets for MAS rose across multiple firms – Goldman Sachs to $90, Wells Fargo to $82, Baird to $80, Barclays to $78. Zacks Research raised its FY2026 EPS estimate the day of the event and lifted its FY2028 EPS forecast in the same window. Financial press connected the sentiment shift directly to the investor day narrative, noting that the event was “helping investors focus on the company’s 2028 goals rather than just short-term construction-market noise.” The 2028 framework Masco introduced – approximately 3-4% organic sales growth, 18%+ adjusted operating margin, ~10% adjusted EPS CAGR – moved from announcement to anchor reference inside one news cycle.
“I echo Renee’s sentiments completely. We couldn’t have done this without all of you. I am so very grateful for all your support, your expertise, and your calm demeanor throughout the preparation process and during the presentations. We will definitely make sure to mention your great work to others within our network.”
The best investor days don’t happen at the venue. Teams build them in the months before – in the budget audit, the site walkthrough, the design system, the broadcast plan, and the production logic holding it all together. Let’s talk about yours.
Short answer: D&B investor relations used its 2023 Investor Day to connect the company’s $835 million acquisition of Main Event to a clear growth thesis, backed by operating targets, store economics, and a vision for 550+ locations.
One year after the acquisition, Dave & Buster’s had a bigger job than explaining the transaction. Investors needed to see how the integration would create value, which synergies leadership could capture, and whether the original “eatertainment” pioneer could absorb more than 50 Main Event locations without diluting either brand.
This was not a routine corporate update – it was a strategic reset. Dave & Buster’s needed to unite two brands, explain its organic growth initiatives, prove the economics behind the combined portfolio, and give Wall Street a credible view of what came next.
The challenge: Turn a complex integration story into a focused investor narrative that leadership could deliver with confidence, in the room and through a live broadcast.
Cardboard Spaceship served as the full-service production partner, connecting strategic messaging, presentation design, immersive event production, and live execution. Every part of the experience reinforced the same investment story – from the first slide to the final question.
We worked with D&B’s leadership and investor relations team to turn the Main Event integration into clear, investor-ready messaging. The narrative focused on three pillars: synergy realization, organic growth initiatives, and disciplined domestic and international expansion.
Every slide advanced the story. We built a cohesive presentation system that made financial projections, operating milestones, store economics, and growth roadmaps easier to understand and evaluate.
Dave & Buster’s built its brand around shared experiences, so the Investor Day needed that same energy. We blended polished executive presentations with dynamic content that made the combined company’s potential tangible for investors.
On event day, our team managed the show flow, transitions, pacing, technical systems, and live broadcast. That discipline let leadership focus on the message and engage the audience with confidence.
Strong Investor Days move quickly from ambition to proof. Dave & Buster’s used the event to show investors how the combined company could create value through store performance, brand integration, and disciplined expansion.
The presentation gave analysts specific numbers to evaluate: 40% ROI across store cohorts, 38 international locations, and a 550-store vision. Those figures turned the strategy into something analysts could test. The acquisition was no longer a standalone transaction – it became part of a measurable operating model.
The presentation design made that evidence easier to absorb. Instead of asking dense slides to carry the argument, the visual system organized projections, milestones, and growth priorities into a sequence the audience could follow. Leadership explained the logic, and the screens made the proof visible.
Dave & Buster’s 2023 Investor Day gave the market more than a plan – it gave investors a clearer way to value the combined company. Following the event, the stock price increased by more than 20%, and the presentation established measurable benchmarks for store performance and expansion. The story did not simply explain the strategy. It made the strategy investable.
Dave & Buster’s 2023 Investor Day did not just inform – it moved the market:
A major transaction does not become an investment thesis on its own. Investor relations teams must connect the deal to operating evidence, future milestones, and a story leadership can own. Dave & Buster’s made that connection visible by pairing a disciplined narrative with production that helped investors absorb it.
The event also shows why teams should involve creative and production partners early. When strategy, scripts, presentation design, video, and live execution develop together, the audience gets one coherent story instead of a series of disconnected presentations. One event. One argument. No daylight between the strategy and the experience.
Explore Cardboard Spaceship’s Investor Day Production services to see how we help public companies turn high-stakes updates into clear, credible, and measurable investor communications.
Yesway needed a roadshow video that could carry the company’s story into investor meetings at the most consequential moment in its history – the move to the public markets.
The brief was simple. The scope was not.
By April 2026, when Yesway priced its IPO on Nasdaq under the ticker YSWY, the company was operating 449 convenience stores across nine states in the Midwest and Southwest, anchored by a growth story built on strategic acquisitions, new store development, foodservice strength, private-label products, and the cultural pull of the Allsup’s brand. Yesway had been here before.
The company first filed to go public in September 2021 and withdrew the registration in December 2022, citing “current market conditions.” Fed rate hikes, persistent inflation, and the war in Ukraine had sent global IPO proceeds down 94% from 2021 – the worst stretch for new listings in decades. That history made the 2026 roadshow more than a procedural step. It was a reintroduction — a chance to put the company in front of institutional investors at a moment when the market was still pricing risk carefully.
One video had to do a lot of work in a short runtime. It needed to communicate Yesway’s operating footprint, leadership strength, brand momentum, growth strategy, and financial story in a format built for an audience that watches roadshow videos for a living.
Institutional investors have seen thousands of these. They know the difference between a company that owns its narrative and one assembling it in real time. The challenge was not producing a polished IPO video. It was making a fast-growing, multi-brand convenience retailer feel credible, investable, and fully aligned across every frame.
That made trust the central creative focus.
The executives had to come across as the people running the business, not reading from a deck. The store footage had to prove the scale and energy of the operation. The aerial and on-site commercial footage had to make the footprint feel tangible to investors who would never set foot in a Yesway. The animation had to clarify the financial story, not decorate it. The edit had to thread leadership, operations, brand, and growth into one continuous argument.
One video. Many audiences. Every frame had to belong to the same story.
Cardboard Spaceship built the production around the narrative first.
Before cameras rolled, the project was shaped around the story Yesway needed investors to understand: the scale of the business, the strength of the operating model, the leadership behind the growth, and the brand’s position in the market.
From there, every production decision served that story.
The scope included:
The scale was significant. Which meant the real work was alignment.
A roadshow video lives or dies on whether the audience trusts what they are watching. The b-roll has to back up the executive narrative. The animation has to make the financials easier to understand, not harder. And the edit has to maintain momentum without rushing past the proof points that analysts are looking for.
We built each element with the others in mind, so the final video read as one continuous case for Yesway rather than a collection of well-produced parts.
The finished video gave Yesway a credible, cohesive investor communications asset for its IPO — leadership interviews, operational footage, brand storytelling, financial context, and commercial production threaded into a single narrative designed for high-stakes meetings.
In shareholder communications at this level, production value is the floor, not the ceiling. The real responsibility is clarity. The audience needs to understand the company, believe the leadership, and leave the room more confident than they came in.
Yesway priced its IPO on April 21, 2026, raising $280 million in the base offering at a market capitalization of roughly $1.2 billion. The book was reported as approximately 10x oversubscribed, with multiple long-only anchor orders — institutional commitments that come together during the roadshow process. Shares opened the next morning at $22, 10% above the $20 IPO price. The underwriters exercised the full overallotment option for an additional $42 million, bringing aggregate gross proceeds to $322 million, and YSWY traded above its IPO price through the first weeks of public ownership.
We came in early. The story was Yesway’s; the full-service production architecture was ours. Every choice was made for the room – what an analyst sees, what they remember, what they carry into the next meeting.
An IPO roadshow video is the only piece of communication on a deal that has to carry across every investor meeting – the same content, dozens of audiences, no second chances. It has to be polished enough to belong on a Nasdaq stage and clear enough that an analyst takes a single, decisive note. Building for both is the work.
That’s what the moment demands. We hold every investor-facing production to it.
The Moment
Carlisle Companies, the building envelope leader, had a story that needed to land with precision: Vision 2030, the company’s multi-year strategic roadmap, communicated directly to shareholders, analysts, and the broader market.
A strategic plan announcement is one of the highest-stakes moments in a public company’s communications calendar. It sets expectations for years. Analysts replay it, clip it, quote it, and scrutinize it. And unlike an earnings call, there’s no next quarter to refine the message. In other words, the launch is the message.
Carlisle made a decision more public companies are making: rather than staging a live, in-person Investor Day, they would deliver Vision 2030 as a fully produced video broadcast. Above all, they wanted a format the company controlled from the first frame to the last.
That decision raised the bar on production. As a result, the bar on production rose considerably. After all, when the broadcast is the event, there is no room to hide. Every cut, graphic, and transition either reinforces the credibility of the plan or quietly undermines it.
Carlisle engaged Cardboard Spaceship as the full-service video production partner to direct, produce, and deliver the Vision 2030 investor video.
The Challenge
A broadcast-first Investor Day carries a distinct set of demands:
Multiple executive voices, one coherent narrative. Carlisle’s leadership team told the Vision 2030 story — CEO, CFO, and functional leaders each owning a chapter of the plan. Each segment had to feel like part of a single, continuous broadcast, not a stitched-together collection of talking heads.
A presentation deck that had to perform on screen. Companies build investor presentations for a boardroom, not a broadcast. Carlisle’s supplemental deck contained the substance of the plan — and it demanded translation into animated, motion-designed sequences that could hold attention on screen and reinforce each executive’s point in the moment they made it.
A hard date and a compressed runway. Strategic announcements don’t move. We engineered the production, animation, and post-production schedule backward from a fixed delivery date, with structured client review windows built in — not bolted on.
When Carlisle Companies announced its seven-year strategic plan to Wall Street, it didn’t book a ballroom. It released a broadcast. Cardboard Spaceship served as the full-service video production partner behind the Vision 2030 investor video, directing executive capture on location, animating the investor presentation deck, and running an expedited post-production schedule built around a hard announcement date.
Cardboard Spaceship directed and produced executive pre-records on location in Scottsdale, Arizona — a streamlined single-day production model with morning load-in, setup, and pre-light, followed by controlled, teleprompter-supported capture sessions. The efficiency wasn’t a budget decision; it was a respect-for-the-C-suite decision. Executive time is the scarcest resource on any investor project, and the production plan was built to use as little of it as possible while capturing everything the edit would need.
Every session was captured with the final broadcast in mind: consistent framing, lighting, and pacing across executives so segments recorded on different days — and in different rounds of the engagement — would cut together as one program.
Cardboard Spaceship’s animation and graphics team transformed Carlisle’s investor presentation into broadcast-ready motion sequences — general animation, graphic overlays, and design treatments timed to specific talking points and financial data. The goal was never decoration. It was synchronization: when a leader referenced a strategic driver or a market trend, the viewer saw it move on screen at that exact moment.
This is where video production and investor relations discipline have to work as one system. Animated financial content has to be accurate, on-brand, and legally reviewed — which means the graphics pipeline has to survive script revisions and deck updates without breaking the schedule.
The post-production plan ran on an expedited, milestone-driven schedule: an animatic for early alignment (music, placeholder voiceover, still frames of design graphics), followed by structured review versions with consolidated client feedback windows measured in hours, not weeks — including contingency planning for weekend turnaround to protect the delivery date.
That structure matters more than it sounds. Investor content involves IR, legal, finance, and executive stakeholders, and unmanaged feedback is the single most common way high-stakes video timelines collapse. By defining review rounds, feedback deadlines, and a single consolidated-comments channel up front, the schedule absorbed revisions instead of being derailed by them.
Investor audiences don’t just evaluate the numbers — they evaluate the confidence and coherence with which the numbers are delivered. A produced broadcast gives a company total control over that delivery: no A/V variables, no room acoustics, no lost lavalier at the podium. Every shareholder, from the largest institutional holder to the retail investor watching on a phone, sees exactly the same presentation, delivered exactly as intended.
It also extends the moment. A live Investor Day happens once; a produced broadcast becomes a permanent, linkable asset — hosted on the IR site, referenced in follow-up meetings, clipped for ongoing communications.
The trade-off is that production quality becomes the entire experience. There’s no live energy to carry a weak edit. Which is exactly why the format demands a production partner fluent in both broadcast craft and capital markets communication.
Vision 2030 is a case study in what we mean when we say high-stakes communications need more than content — they need orchestration. The executive capture, the animated deck, the review structure, and the delivery schedule weren’t separate workstreams. They were one system, engineered backward from a single immovable moment: the day Carlisle told the market where it was going.
For Zeta Global’s October 8, 2025 Investor Day, Cardboard Spaceship led event production, presentation development, the global live broadcast and Q&A, and XR/VR stage integration—turning a complex AI growth story into an investor-ready experience.
The Client
Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE: ZETA) is a leading AI-powered marketing technology company. Founded by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley, Zeta’s marketing platform leverages artificial intelligence and trillions of consumer signals to help enterprise brands acquire, grow, and retain customers through AI-powered insights and omnichannel activation.
The Challenge
Investor Days are high-stakes moments. The Street is watching. Analysts are dissecting every word. Executive leadership has one shot to translate complex business strategy into a clear, compelling investment thesis.
For Zeta — an AI platform operating at massive scale with a growth story that demanded precise articulation — the stakes were especially high. They needed a production partner who could handle the complexity: multiple executive presenters, a live in-person investor audience, a simultaneous global broadcast, and a Q&A session that had to flow seamlessly across both formats.
Cardboard Spaceship served as the full-service production partner, leading every dimension of the engagement:
End-to-end event management from pre-production through execution, ensuring every detail — from presenter run-of-show to technical redundancy — planned and de-risked.
A broadcast-quality stream reaching investors worldwide, with integrated Q&A that allowed remote participants to engage in real-time alongside the in-person audience.
Strategic collaboration with executive teams to refine narratives, develop visual storytelling, and build presentations that translated Zeta’s AI-powered platform into investor-ready language.
Immersive extended reality elements that transformed the stage environment, creating visual depth and technological sophistication that matched Zeta’s positioning as an AI leader.
From every single analyst, this was the best investor day they had seen. That confidence in the production value, how it came together, and then the story that allowed us to be able to communicate — 12 out of 10.
A seamless Investor Day experience that elevated Zeta’s story and strengthened engagement with the investment community. Complex technology translated clearly. Executive presenters delivered with confidence. And the broadcast performed without compromise — reaching global investors with the same production quality experienced in the room.
For CF Industries’ June 24, 2025 Investor Day in New York City, Cardboard Spaceship produced an integrated content and broadcast program spanning six facilities, with executive video, 3D animation, presentation design, and live global Q&A.
CF Industries—one of the world’s largest nitrogen producers — needed an Investor Day that could do more than inform. With a multi-billion dollar growth story spanning new facilities, clean energy initiatives, and operational expansion, they needed to bring investors inside that vision. The catch: key stakeholders were spread across the globe, facilities were scattered across six locations, and the story had to land with the precision investors expect from a Fortune 500.
The stakes were high. This wasn’t a quarterly call — it was a strategic moment to reshape how the market understood CF’s trajectory.
Cardboard Spaceship partnered with CF Industries to produce a fully integrated Investor Day experience that brought their growth story to life. Our team delivered end-to-end production across six locations, capturing cinematic b-roll, producing leadership testimonials, and creating 3D animations that visualized new facility developments.
Cardboard Spaceship was engaged to develop and deliver a complete content package for the event, including executive interviews, visual storytelling, multi-camera coverage, and polished post-production.
We deployed production teams across six CF facilities nationwide, capturing cinematic b-roll that put investors on the ground: ammonia plants in operation, clean energy infrastructure in development, and the scale of CF’s manufacturing footprint. Every shot was designed to build credibility and tell the story visually.
We produced scripted interviews with CF’s executive leadership — designed not as talking heads, but as direct-to-investor narratives. Each testimonial video reinforced key messages while letting leadership personalities come through.
For facilities still in development, we created custom 3D animations that visualized future-state operations. Investors could see what’s coming — not just hear about it.
On event day, we executed a live global broadcast with synchronized presentations, seamless transitions between pre-produced content and live remarks, and real-time Q&A. Technical precision met creative storytelling—investors stayed engaged from opening frame to final question.
We unified CF’s investor deck under a single creative direction, ensuring every slide reinforced the visual language established in video and animation. No disconnect between what leadership said and what investors saw.
CF Industries’ Investor Day set a new benchmark for their investor communications program:
For Terex Corporation’s December 13, 2022 Investor Day at the NYSE, Cardboard Spaceship produced five executive video segments across Seattle, New Jersey, and Ireland, then unified them through one visual system, custom animation, and investor-ready post-production.
Terex Corporation is a global manufacturer of materials processing machinery and aerial work platforms. They design, build and support products used in construction, maintenance, manufacturing, energy, recycling, minerals and materials management applications. The company had not had an investor day in years and was implementing new strategic initiatives to grow shareholder value. They needed multiple company sizzle reels to highlight executive segments and worked with Cardboard Spaceship to make that happen.
Terex Corporation hadn’t hosted an investor day in years. For a global manufacturer with new strategic initiatives designed to grow shareholder value, that silence had a cost — and 2022 was the moment to break it.
The company wasn’t just returning to the investor day stage. It was using the moment to reintroduce its leadership team, reframe its growth narrative, and rebuild confidence with an analyst and investor community that hadn’t heard directly from Terex in a meaningful way for some time. The content had to do serious work — quickly, convincingly, and at the standard a public company’s most critical audience demands.
The production challenge matched the strategic one. Five executives. Three locations spanning North America and Europe. Each location requiring multiple shoot days, independent crew buildouts, scouted environments, and consistent visual execution. Capturing five distinct voices and distilling them into a cohesive set of investor day sizzle reels — without losing the individual authority each executive needed to project — required a production architecture that most companies don’t have the infrastructure to attempt on their own.
There was no margin for inconsistency. Investors and analysts scrutinize everything: how a company looks, how its leaders speak, how polished or unpolished the production feels. After years away from the investor day stage, Terex needed to show up with precision.
Before any camera moved, the work began with Edelman Smithfield and the Terex team to align on what this investor day needed to say — and how each executive’s segment would contribute to the larger strategic story.
Coordinating a production across Seattle, New Jersey, and Ireland simultaneously presented a logistics challenge that required a purpose-built infrastructure — not a standard single-location shoot model scaled up.
Five executives, three countries, one visual standard. The creative treatment was the mechanism that made this possible.
The post-production pipeline was built to handle the volume and complexity of a multi-location, multi-deliverable project — and to deliver content investor-ready on deadline.
What the plan required on paper was challenging. What it required in execution was something else.
Across multiple shoot days in Seattle, New Jersey, and Ireland, the Cardboard Spaceship team managed the full weight of a distributed global production — independent crews, international logistics, and five executives with schedules, contexts, and communication styles that had to be navigated with the same care as the cameras pointed at them. Ireland alone required coordinating equipment and personnel across an international border, with no room for the kind of delays that international productions routinely encounter.
Each location presented its own environment to shape. The production design team worked to create settings that felt specific to Terex’s world — industrial, purposeful, authoritative — while maintaining the visual consistency that would allow an editor thousands of miles away to cut between Seattle and Dublin without a seam showing.
The b-roll captured at each location wasn’t filler. It was evidence — operational footage that grounded each executive’s strategic claims in the physical reality of a company that manufactures and moves equipment across the world. When Terex’s leadership talked about global scale, the footage proved it.
By the time post-production began, the team was assembling not just five videos, but a coordinated investor day content suite — animation, GFX, and executive segments working together as a single, unified package delivered ready for the virtual event platform and the investor audience waiting on the other side of it.
“Your team showed amazing patience, creativity and resilience. The finished videos are masterful and should be very impactful. Everybody loves the look and feel.”
Terex’s 2022 investor day marked the company’s return to one of the highest-stakes stages in investor relations — and the production met the moment.
Investor sentiment following the event was largely positive. The executive sizzle reels did what investor day video production is supposed to do: they gave the analyst and investor community a clear, confident, and cohesive view of Terex’s leadership and strategic direction. Five executives, captured across two continents, arrived on screen as one unified voice.
Internally, the reception was unambiguous. Jon Patterson, Vice President & Treasurer at Terex Corporation, put it directly:
“It was such a pleasure to work with all of you. Your team showed amazing patience, creativity and resilience. The finished videos are masterful and should be very impactful. Everybody loves the look and feel.”
The words “patience, creativity, and resilience” aren’t generic praise. They describe exactly what a multi-location, multi-week global production demands — and what separates a production partner who can handle that complexity from one who can’t.
For a company returning to the investor day stage after years away, the goal wasn’t just to produce content. It was to show up with the authority and precision that rebuilds confidence. The work delivered.
