Robitussin.com, one of the most beautiful packaged goods sites in the history of the world, launched today. Besides beauty, the site features news about coughs, colds and flu, plus coupons paired with interactive tools that help consumers figure out where to redeem them. While we’re not claiming that Robitussin is sold out because of the site we built, it would really, really, really surprise us if you were able to find ANY Robitussin on store shelves. We can’t even keep our own employees out of CVS and Rite Aid. They just want to buy the stuff up.

Visit our office, and you’ll notice that NOBODY is coughing here.

Long before founding The Wonderfactory, Joe McCambley and David Link teamed up to lead the country in scoring, assists and steals for North Carolina. They rejected million dollar NBA contracts and many more millions in endorsements to pursue their true dream: to help content providers and advertisers create advertising so useful, consumers would view it as a service.*

Still, they always wondered what life would have been like had they answered the call of the NBA. They recently found out when the NBA called again, and asked them to create a new design for the NBA Development League Web site. Finally, the #1 basketball brand on earth would be teamed with the #1 design shop on earth.

You can check out our work for the NBA by visiting the Portfolio section of our site.

* Just kidding. Joe and David suck at basketball.

When your lips get dry and chapped, you always turn to Chapstick for help, right? But where does Chapstick turn when their site is tired and dry? Who heals the healer?

The Wonderfactory, that’s who! Chapstick’s new site launched on October 15th, 2009. As a result, according to a New York Times story that we can’t find right now, kissing has increased 44% in North America.

The Wonderfactory has partnered up with Hearst to develop the design and experience of a number of new online properties using an aggregation engine to pull in the best relevant news/content mixed with unique live data graphics. Here is what Techcrunch had to say about the launch: "Hearst is taking a different approach with a new site launching today called LMK (Let Me Know). It brings in a river of news and photos on 2.3 million people and topics from authoritative sources. In other words, Hearst is getting into the news aggregation game, but with its own high-design twist."

Centrum.com is the first of five sites that we will launch for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare over the coming months. It's also our first foray into Consumer Packaged Goods. We're excited to work with Wyeth to build packaged goods sites that offer the content, tools, and product information that keeps consumers returning habitually.

As part of our efforts to bolster our ability to develop original content for our advertising clients, we recently hired Colleen Doyle to run Project Mangement. Colleen joins us from Martha Stewart Omnimedia where she was Vice President, Products. While at MSLO, Colleen led a 50-person team and 5 consulting companies to relaunch marthastewart.com on to Vignette's Content Management System. She also served as Director of Emerging Products and oversaw the development of a number of channels, including wholeliving.com, gardening, Home & Decorating, TV, Shop, and Games.

Colleen's experience at conceiving, developing, and launching original content experiences for one of the Web's most successful brands will enhance our ability to do the same for our online marketing clients.

About 18 months ago the folks at Time Inc. told us they planned to relaunch life.com in partnership with Getty Images, and they asked for our help to develop a new kind of site--a news and topic based site leading off with great photographs as opposed to headlines. Their biggest request: "It just can't look or behave like any other news or photography site."

You can see our answer to their request, and the design philosophy and process we followed to develop the prototype that inspired the live site in our portfolio section.

Three days after it's launch on March 31, 2009 the new life.com had attracted one million unique visitors, and generated over 10 million page views.

If you watched the Presidential Inauguration, you’re familiar with Pastor Rick Warren, who delivered the Invocation. He is also one of the most celebrated authors in history, with over 30,000,000 issues of The Purpose Driven Life in print. Reader’s Digest recently partnered with Rick and hired us to design purposedriven.com as a place where Christians can go to determine their life’s purpose, to track their progress against that purpose, inspire others, and be inspired by others.

If you’re looking to buy anything over the coming months, check out one of our most recent site launches, consumersearch.com. Consumer Search collects the reviews written about a product, analyzes all the reviewers’ picks, and tells you what to buy. So, if you’re looking for the best digital camera, there’s no longer need to wade through 16,000,000 Google search results or 1,500 Amazon reviews. Just go to Consumer Search and do what they tell you. 

In January of this year The Wonderfactory began working with National Geographic and their internal creative teams on a complete overhaul of the National Geographic online properties. You can see examples of our redesign of the home page, "People and Places", and "World Music" pages in our portfolio.

The Wonderfactory recently began working with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to completely redesign their online properties. We'd show you the work in progress, but then we'd have to, well, you know...

AOL recently launched a fabulous service that allows AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) members to drag and drop almost any kind of AOL content onto their personal home pages. Want to create a list of your favorite movies, and link to theaters in your area? AIM lets you do it. Want to create a feature about your favorite band? Just drag and drop a photo gallery onto your site. For our effort, AOL asked us to design personal pages for WNBA athletes that contained lots of personal information for their fans and links to their favorite AOL content.

Earlier this year Starz tapped The Wonderfactory to help launch Vongo, Starz' new movie download service (see October 14, 2005 item below). The original TV spots, online product tours, and website performed so well that Starz signed up for another round of 30-second spots, which just broke nationally. Check 'em out.

The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's much talked-about and highly successful celebrity blog site recently chose TWF to redesign their online experience. The Huffington Post is actually tied to be the first company crazy enough to write a check to us in 2005 when they needed some design work. (The checks from Huffington and Starz arrived on the same day.)  We'll be forever in their debt.

Hours before the NY Humane Society forced us to shut our doors The Wonderfactory moved out of our old space, affectionately known to employees as "The Veal Pen." We're now located in spacious new offices at 28 W. 25th Street in New York. If you'd like to reserve a membership to our 60 X 30 foot heated rooftop pool, send us a $5,000 check to cover your membership fee. We'll call you as soon as it opens.

After 15 months of being called "Lincoln McCambley," "Link+McCrumbery," "Rink+McCamble," and having our name shortened by clients to "Link," "L+M" and then simply "L," we're crying uncle and changing our name. As of August 18th, 2006 we're calling ourselves The Wonderfactory. What the rest of the world will call us remains to be seen.

Earlier this month TWF worked with technology partners Digital Grit and Bright Cove to launch petstyle.com, America's first broadband pet channel. What YouTube did for humans, petstyle.com will do for dogs. Reports that Google has offered to purchase www.petstyle.com for almost 2 billion chew treats are grossly exaggerated. (Besides, everyone knows that some chew treats are bad for dogs.)

Flock is an amazing new web browser that makes it easy to share photos and videos online. It also has features that make blogging as easy as falling off a horse (but a lot less painful and smelly). Our work launches in June, 2007, but you can start using a beta version of the browser now by visiting www.flock.com. By the way, if you come to our site after 6/15 you'd BETTER be using Flock. We just invented a new technology that allows us to send electric shocks through your keyboard, and we'll use it! Your hair will fall out.

In October Starz Entertainment chose TWF to create a version of their customer acquisition site for Vongo,the new movie download service, to coincide with the launch of Windows Vista. There are unconfirmed reports that the day our site went live there was so much traffic that it brought Microsoft to its knees. If any of you see Bill Gates, tell him to stop calling us. We're just doing our jobs, same as him.

The Wonderfactory is collaborating with Newsweek to develop unique addictive experiences in the ever crowded "Online News Industry". More news to come...

After almost 18 months of partnership with WebMD, the completely redesigned www.webmd.com is now live and kicking butt. We're especially proud of the Health Checker, Health Videos, and their new and improved health search.

The new site we developed with the Martha Stewart online team features 15 years of archival content from Martha's various magazines, thousands of hours of How To videos, Tips and Picks from expert editors, enhanced search tools, and some of the most intuitive navigation and exquisite design you'll find anywhere. We could talk about this one forever, but maybe you'd rather hear from Martha Stewart herself. See the site tour we created, featuring Martha Stewart herself, at www.marthastewart.com.

It used to be that the three most important things to consider in real estate were “Location, location, location.” Our new site for Front Door, a division of Scripps Networks, proves what it REALLY takes is sound strategy, intuitive user interface design, and a fabulous visual design that differentiates you from the masses of real estate sites that clutter the web. Having The Wonderfactory as your partner probably doesn’t hurt either. www.frontdoor.com

When it comes to advocating for consumers online, TWF is like a dog with a bone. That’s why we begged NBC Universal to let us put our mark on petside.com, their new site designed to collar dog and cat lovers. Eventually, they rolled over and shook on the deal, and we jumped through hoops to get the site live by year end. We think the results are quite fetching. www.petside.com

When The Washington Post needed help with their relaunch, they turned to Woodward and Bernstein and asked them to uncover the best design shop in the country, if not the world. Guess who they chose?

Although the new site won’t go live for a few months, you probably don’t want to wait too long before you short sell The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

After months of development the new newsweek.com went live during the fourth quarter of 2007. Who said a news site has to look like yahoo news to be successful? Not us. www.newsweek.com

How do you take an iconic site like foodnetwork.com and make it even better? We’re not sure yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we’re finished working with Scripps on the relaunch. Look for the new site soon.

Hearst was looking for the best design firm in the world to help them redefine how local news is gets delivered over their 29 television station web sites. After searching the seven continents they landed on a tiny little design shop just a few blocks from their corporate headquarters: TWF! The new sites go live in early 2009.
  

By June of 2007 TWF had grown to the point where we needed 5,000 square feet of new office space to supplement the 5,000 we already had. We asked the guys in the office space next door if they’d move out so we could move in, but they said no.

Freakishly, after two fires, a flood, a snapped elevator cable, 17 broken windows, a computer virus that brought their network to its knees, and a home invasion, the owner decided that maybe he didn’t really want to be in New York. Now we have a great new space next door to our old space.

Our new office space features a video production facility, a game room, a conference room named "Hell," (so we can tell each other to 'go to Hell'), a secret ideas laboratory, a full library complete with swings where you can sit and enjoy a view of the Empire State Building, and a 50-foot mural painted by one of our fabulous senior designers, Angel Angelov. Come by for a visit. There’s always a nice Belgian Beer in the fridge with your name on it. Our FedEx guy tells us it's the best office in all of Manhattan. He should know. He's been to all of them!

TWF.com has a BOLD new look and addictive content experiences, just like the ones we make for our clients!

Looking for a job? Learn about the kind of people we covet by viewing our open positions.  Want to know more about the things that inspire us? Check out our Directors' profiles. Interested in the work we do? Visit our portfolio. Or, if you just want to check out photos of the coconut-oil-slathered bodies on the deck of our rooftop pool, you can do that too.

If you'd like  to buy almost-new furniture and equipment really cheap, take a tour of our new space and pick out a sound-proofed video production studio (complete with green screen and cool HD video camera), a nice leather sofa, or a pool float.