Ben & Jerry’s was one of Vermont Design Works’ first clients in 2000, and we’ve maintained friendly contact over the years. In January 2009, they came to us with an unusual, top-secret project: the Cyclone Dairy website. Ostensibly a site for a cloned-cow dairy farm, it was to extol the supposed virtues of milk from those cows. In fact, the site was an elaborate April Fools’ joke – part of an activist PR campaign to highlight the potential dangers of milk from cloned cows (which is currently mixed into the regular milk supply without consumer warning labels).
Ben and Jerry’s wanted to launch the site in mid-March, so the Vermont Design Works team went into overdrive to get the site ready in time. Our hard work paid off when the site lit up the blogosphere as soon as it went public. Then, as planned, we added a video to the site’s homepage on April Fool's Day that revealed Ben & Jerry’s as the masterminds behind the joke.
We also felt honored to be chosen as Ben and Jerry’s partner in this project – although they have a worldwide advertising presence and could choose a big agency for their campaigns, we’re the only outside web design firm they’ve ever worked with.