How do you share 200 years of corporate history?
Client Challenge
As one of the few major corporations to grow up with the nation, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company understood the importance of leveraging its business history for its approaching 200-year anniversary. DuPont turned to HAI to help understand, synthesize, and share its story with employees, stakeholders, and the public.
Delivering Two Solutions
To convey its history, DuPont chose to pursue digital and analog options. HAI collaborated with the company to develop a digital collection of hundreds of essays covering the people, places, and products critical to 200 years of business history. The site also documented broader subjects such as DuPont research, corporate culture, and investor relations.
DuPont also charged our team to write a book that adhered to the highest historical standard but was “still eminently readable by employees, retirees, and the general public.” Relying on the exhaustive documentary and photographic research undertaken for the online archive, the team produced a richly-illustrated, 268-page coffee table history book, titled From the Banks of the Brandywine to the Miracles of Science.
“The DuPont book is “intelligent, informative, and honest to a fault.”
Historian John Kenly Smith
Outcome
The end products exceeded expectations, creating a valuable, lasting historical record. DuPont’s heritage site, www.heritage.dupont.com, has become a useful resource for students, employees, retirees, and journalists who want to know more about DuPont’s business, corporate history, and legendary products. Meanwhile, the book achieved the dual objective of being both highly academic and accessible, further confirmed when noted historian John Kenly Smith pronounced it “intelligent, informative, and honest to a fault.”
