Brand Direct Marketing Almanac | bdma.org on BDMA.org

Everlane's Radical Transparency: A Catalog-Era Trust Tactic

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Founding Pledge: Publish the True Cost

Everlane built its entire founding pitch around a single document a catalog copywriter would recognize instantly: an itemized invoice. Founded in 2010 by Michael Preysman and Jesse Farmer, the company's pledge was to publish the per-unit cost of each garment — materials, labor, transportation — right alongside the retail price, a practice it trademarked under the name "Radical Transparency," as The San Francisco Standard has reported. The company's own About page still frames the pitch the same way it did at launch: "We reveal the true costs behind all of our products — from materials to labor to transportation — then offer them to you, minus the traditional retail markup." A sample comparison on that page sets a $30 Everlane T-shirt against a $55 "Traditional Retail" price for the same category of item — the pricing pitch reduced to a single, checkable number.

The Sears Star Logo: A Retail Icon's Visual History

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Star Grafted Onto a Century-Old Wordmark

Sears kept the same corporate logotype in place for twenty-one years before retiring it in June 1984 — a swap UPI reported as straight business news the day it happened. That kind of coverage is itself a signal: a retailer's wordmark rarely makes the wire unless the retailer sending it out is large enough that a redesign counts as a market event. Sears had earned that scale the hard way, over nearly a century of mail-order catalogs, and every version of its logo — from the lettering on turn-of-the-century catalog covers to the star-accented mark unveiled for Sears Canada in 2016 — had to carry the weight of a brand that had, at various points, been among the largest retailers in the United States.

Glossier's DTC Playbook: Direct Marketing Without the Catalog

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Catalog Logic Behind a Brand That Never Mailed One

No printed catalog ever built Glossier's customer list. There was no seasonal mailer, no wish-book, no direct-mail envelope with a discount code inside. The brand that would become one of the most-cited case studies in direct-to-consumer retail started as a beauty blog's comment section, and by the time it had a product to sell, it already had an audience that felt like it had co-written the thing. That sequence — audience first, product second, distribution channel third — inverts almost every assumption the catalog era built its business on, where the mailer went out to a purchased list and the relationship started with the sale. Glossier's founder, Emily Weiss, launched the blog Into the Gloss in 2010 while working as an assistant at Vogue, interviewing women about their beauty routines and reading the reader comments as closely as the posts themselves. The company launched in 2014 as a direct offshoot of that blog, selling its first products straight to the readers who had spent years telling Weiss what they actually wanted.

L.L. Bean Copy Voice: Functional, Not Fussy

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Voice Built to Survive a Return

L.L. Bean's copy has never needed to convince a reader that a product looks good. It needed to convince the reader that the product works — and every rhetorical habit the brand's catalog prose developed over more than a century follows from that one requirement. Adjectives are cheap. A claim that a boot will keep a hunter's feet dry through a Maine November is expensive, because it can be tested, and because the company that made it had already learned, in its first year of business, exactly what happens when the claim is wrong.

L.L. Bean Covers: When the Brand Went Mass

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Boot, the Flyer, and the Covers That Followed

The first L.L. Bean mailing was not a catalog — it was a flyer, produced in 1912, mailed to hunters and promising a boot that would keep feet dry in the field. Leon Leonwood Bean had returned from a hunting trip with wet feet and cold legs, and the solution he devised — a rubber boot bottom stitched to a leather upper — became the Maine Hunting Shoe. As the story has been retold in brand histories ever since, that first flyer sold around ninety pairs, and nearly all came back: the stitching failed under real field conditions. Bean refunded every customer, rebuilt the boot, and mailed again. This time the boot held. The cover of a catalog that would eventually reach millions of American households had begun as a promise to hunters about waterproofing.

Patagonia's Climbing Silhouette Logo

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Skyline That Wasn't Designed to Last

Six jagged peaks rise out of the Patagonian steppe — not a smooth alpine arch, not a tidy triangle, but a genuinely ragged silhouette that reads as chaotic before it reads as beautiful. Above those peaks, the sky breaks into horizontal bands of blue, violet, and orange, the kind of gradient the actual Patagonian sky produces at dusk when the Southern Hemisphere sun drops behind the range. This is the image that has sat above the word "patagonia" on clothing, labels, and hang-tags since 1976: the profile of Mount Fitz Roy, rendered in black, with a banded sky that looks hand-drawn rather than corporate. As the inkbotdesign.com account of the logo's history records, freelance artist Jocelyn Slack created the emblem under the direction of Yvon Chouinard, working from photographs of Fitz Roy — she had never visited the mountain — and was paid not in cash but in Chouinard climbing hardware. The logo appeared on product labels from the brand's first collections. Nobody designed it to be iconic. It stuck because it was specific.

Gap Logo Redesign: The Six-Day Disaster of 2010

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Logo That Vanished Overnight

On the morning of October 4, 2010, visitors to gap.com noticed something wrong. The familiar dark-blue square that had anchored the retailer's identity for two decades — white block-serif letters spelling GAP floating inside a solid navy field — had been replaced overnight by something that looked, to many observers, like a placeholder. Advertising Age and design publications across the industry would spend the following week documenting the fallout, but on that morning the change had arrived without a press release, without announcement, without context. The Gap name now appeared in black Helvetica, a workhorse typeface more associated with road signs and corporate memos than with one of America's most-recognized apparel brands. Behind the letter "p," a small gradient blue square floated — a vestigial nod to the old logo, reduced from anchor to afterthought.

REI Covers as Environmental Statement

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Figure at the Edge of the Frame

The composition recurs across half a century of REI catalog covers: a wide-angle landscape frame, sky and ridge occupying the majority of the image, and somewhere in the lower third — or pushed to the edge entirely — a single figure. A climber reduced to a bright point against a granite wall. A hiker's silhouette on a ridgeline where the ridge is the subject. A kayaker on a grey river whose breadth makes the boat nearly abstract. The Utah State University outdoor recreation archive, which holds REI catalog editions spanning 1966 to 2019, offers a longitudinal view of this compositional grammar sustained across decades of seasonal printing. The gear is present, if visible at all, as something the person is carrying rather than something the person is displaying. The landscape is never the backdrop. It is the subject.

Why High-End Catalogs Use White Space

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One Product Floating, Forty Products Crammed

Open a Tiffany & Co. Blue Book from any decade and the page arrives nearly empty: one ring, maybe two, set against a field of white so clean it reads as intention. Turn to the weekend newspaper insert from a regional discount retailer and you find forty or fifty items stacked across the same page area, prices shouted in red, urgency layered on urgency. Neither designer made an accidental choice. The Tiffany page spends real estate to make a claim; the discount page fills every inch for exactly the same reason. What they are claiming is entirely different — and the tool doing the arguing, in both cases, is the amount of nothing between the things.

Hammacher Schlemmer: The Superlative Machine

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"The World's Smallest Automatic Umbrella (Plum): so compact, you might mistake it for a garnish." — Hammacher Schlemmer product listing, retrieved June 2026

The Voice That Carries the Claim

No retail catalog in the United States has been mailing to customers longer than Hammacher Schlemmer. The company traces its founding to 1848, when Charles Tollner opened a hardware supply store in New York City's Bowery district — pre-dating both Sears and Montgomery Ward by decades, as the Duke University Rubenstein Library noted when it announced the acquisition of the company's records archive in June 2025. The first illustrated catalog appeared in 1881; by 1912, the catalog ran 1,112 pages, a copy of which now sits in the Smithsonian's permanent collection. That record of longevity would be remarkable on its own. What makes Hammacher Schlemmer worth studying as a brand is not the longevity but the voice that has sustained it: a deadpan, authoritative, superlative-anchored prose style that presents a $71,000 navigable water park and a pair of circulation-enhancing travel socks with identical unhurried confidence.

Montgomery Ward vs. Sears: The Catalog War

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Company That Invented the Catalog — and Lost the War

On August 18, 1872, a 28-year-old Chicago dry-goods salesman named Aaron Montgomery Ward mailed out a single sheet of paper listing 163 products with prices and ordering instructions. Total startup capital: $1,600, split between two employees and a rented room on North Clark Street. That document is the first general-merchandise mail-order catalog in American history. Ward was not building on anyone's model — he was inventing one. For roughly two decades he had no serious competition, and the formula worked: by 1874 the catalog had grown to 32 pages; by 1876 it ran to 152 pages with 3,000 items; by the early 1900s Ward's mailing list exceeded 3 million names. Richard Sears, who would eventually eclipse him entirely, did not mail his first general catalog until 1896 — 24 years after Ward had already defined the category.

Lands' End Logo: 60 Years of Incremental Brand Discipline

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Typo That Became a Brand

In the spring of 1963, a former Young & Rubicam copywriter named Gary Comer co-founded a mail-order yachting supply company in Chicago with partners Robert Halperin, Richard Stearns, and two of Stearns' colleagues. They intended to name the company after Land's End, the rocky headland at the southwestern tip of Cornwall, England — a name that evoked nautical grit and the edge of the known world. When the first promotional materials came back from the printer, the apostrophe had migrated: "Land's End" had become "Lands' End." Comer noticed the error immediately. He could not afford to reprint the materials. The typo stayed, and the company's name has been grammatically incorrect ever since.

The J. Peterman Catalog Cover Formula

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Catalog That Looked Like a Field Journal

Hold an early J. Peterman Owner's Manual and the first thing you notice is what is missing. There is no glossy cover stock, no photograph of a smiling model, no grid of merchandise crowding the page. Instead there is a single hand-painted illustration — a duster coat hanging from a peg, a shirt rendered in soft watercolor strokes — floating in white space above a block of romantic prose. One item to a page. No price shouting for attention. The object looks less like something for sale than something recovered from an attic in another country. According to the company's own account of its founding, this was the format of Owner's Manual N°. 1, published in 1988, a year after John Peterman started the business in Lexington, Kentucky, with a $500 stake and a horseman's duster he had bought in Wyoming.

How J. Peterman Invented the Catalog Story Format

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Product Came Last on Purpose

A J. Peterman catalog entry almost never began with the product. It began with a place, a mood, a half-remembered scene — a man stepping off a train in some dusty border town, a woman in a linen dress on a veranda at dusk — and only after the reader had been transported did the garment quietly arrive, almost as an afterthought, as if it had been there in the scene all along. This was the structural inversion at the heart of the J. Peterman Owner's Manual, the catalog John Peterman launched in 1988 after founding the company in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1987 with a $500 stake and a single horseman's duster. The copy did not sell a coat. It sold the life in which the coat made sense, and trusted the reader to want both.

Casper's Direct Mail Playbook

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Would a Subway-Ad Brand Mail Paper?

Why would a digitally native, venture-backed mattress startup — a company that built its name on viral subway posters, online unboxing videos, and a bed compressed into a box on your doorstep — put physical direct mail back into its marketing budget? It is the most analog channel in the mix, the one DTC was supposed to make obsolete. Yet when Casper Sleep filed its S-1 ahead of its 2020 initial public offering, the document listed, in plain language, that its "paid marketing mix of digital marketing, as well as direct mail and television, are expensive and may not result in the cost-effective acquisition" of new customers. Direct mail was not a nostalgic experiment at Casper. It was a line item, sitting alongside the digital spend the company was supposedly built on.

How Color Signals Category in Direct Mail

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two Envelopes, Two Verdicts, No Words

Set a Tiffany & Co. box beside a saturated red-and-yellow discount circular and the eye renders its verdict before a single word is read. The robin's-egg blue signals restraint, luxury, and a price you should not have to ask about; the high-voltage red and yellow signal urgency, volume, and a deal expiring soon. Neither needs a logo or a headline to do this work. Color is the fastest-acting element in direct-mail design — it reaches the reader through the envelope window, across the room, from inside the recycling-bound stack of the day's mail — and it sorts a piece into a category before language ever gets a turn.

L.L. Bean Logo Evolution: A Century of Quiet Discipline

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Signature, Not a Symbol

In the winter of 1912, Leon Leonwood Bean came home from a hunting trip in Freeport, Maine, with cold, wet feet and an idea. He took a pair of rubber galoshes to a local cobbler and asked him to stitch leather uppers onto the rubber bottoms. The result was the Maine Hunting Shoe, and the mail-order business Bean built around it became one of the most durable direct-marketing brands in America. What is notable for anyone studying catalog identity is not how often L.L. Bean changed its logo over the following century — it is how rarely.

How Patagonia Art-Directs Its Catalog Covers

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Cover That Doesn't Sell

Roughly 60,000 photographs arrive at Patagonia every year from customers and wilderness photographers — a torrent of images of alpine climbs, untracked ski bowls, secret surf spots, and first kayak descents. Almost none of them feature a Patagonia product as the subject. And yet, since 1980, these submitted photographs have been the raw material for the most distinctive catalog covers in American direct marketing. The Patagonia cover is built on a deliberate refusal: it does not show you the jacket. It shows you the place the jacket is for.

Eddie Bauer vs. REI: Two Outdoor Brand Voices

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Same City, Same Gear, Two Voices

Two outdoor outfitters were founded in Seattle within eighteen years of each other. Both sold serious gear to serious users. Both built their early businesses substantially through the mail. And yet a customer reading an Eddie Bauer catalog and an REI catalog side by side would hear two completely different brands talking. Eddie Bauer speaks in the first person of a single expert outdoorsman. REI speaks in the collective first person of a membership. That grammatical difference — "I made this" versus "we own this together" — is the root of everything that separates the two voices.

Allbirds: Catalog-Era Copy for a DTC Launch

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One Shoe, One Claim

When Allbirds launched on March 1, 2016, Time magazine called the Wool Runner "the world's most comfortable shoe." The startup had exactly one product — a $95 minimalist sneaker made from merino wool, available online only, in five colors. No retail stores, no product range, no second model to upsell into. A single shoe and a single, audacious claim. To a student of direct marketing, this is not a Silicon Valley innovation. It is the oldest move in the catalog copywriter's playbook, executed with unusual discipline: pick one product, make one promise about it, and say that promise so plainly the reader cannot misunderstand it.

Luxury vs. Value: Catalog Typography Conventions

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Price You Can Read Before You See a Number

Set two catalogs on a table — a luxury home-goods book and a value-retail flyer — and cover every price with your thumb. You will still know, within a second, which one sells expensive things. The signal is the type. Luxury catalogs and value catalogs use typography to communicate price tier before the reader processes a single dollar figure, and the conventions are consistent enough across the industry to function as a visual grammar. Understanding that grammar is one of the most practical skills in direct-mail design, because the type is doing persuasive work whether the designer intends it or not.

IKEA Catalog Discontinuation 2021: End of a 70-Year Era

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The World's Most-Printed Commercial Publication

For seven decades, the IKEA catalog was a fixture in homes across dozens of countries — a thick, glossy invitation to reimagine domestic life through flat-pack furniture and Scandinavian minimalism. At its peak, IKEA printed more than 200 million copies annually in 32 languages for 50 markets, making it one of the most widely distributed commercial publications on earth. It was not merely a shopping tool. It was a brand statement, a cultural object, and for many households, a kind of secular home-design bible.

Sears Catalog: From Giant to Ghost

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Original Everything Store

Before Amazon, before Walmart, before the modern big-box retail era, there was the Sears catalog. Beginning in 1888 as a watch-and-jewelry circular, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog grew into the defining retail document of American life — a thick, annual publication that delivered consumer access to rural households who otherwise had limited options beyond the local general store. At its peak, the Sears Big Book ran to over 600 pages. It sold everything from suits to houses, from sewing machines to automobiles.

How JCPenney Killed Its Catalog in 2010

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A 100-Year Publishing Enterprise, Shut in 90 Days

On January 11, 2010, JCPenney announced it would shut down its catalog division entirely. The company would close its catalog distribution centers, eliminate approximately 3,500 jobs, and end a direct-mail publishing enterprise that had been a central part of its business model for nearly a century. The Big Book — JCPenney's flagship catalog, published twice yearly — would not see another edition.

JCPenney had been mailing catalogs since the 1960s, but its catalog heritage ran even deeper. The company was founded in 1902 by James Cash Penney in Kemmerer, Wyoming, as a small dry-goods store, and its expansion into direct mail tracked the broader growth of catalog retail in mid-century America. At its peak, JCPenney's catalog operation was among the three largest in the United States, alongside Sears and Montgomery Ward — a publishing and fulfillment machine that mailed hundreds of millions of books annually and employed thousands of people across catalog-specific distribution infrastructure.

Warby Parker and the DTC Catalog Revival

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Catalog Logic, Reinvented

When Warby Parker launched in 2010, it did something that most of the venture-backed startup world was not paying attention to: it brought a physical product into the home before the customer had committed to buying it. The home try-on program — five frames, five days, free shipping both ways — is not a digital innovation. It is catalog logic, reimplemented for the e-commerce era.

The mechanics are nearly identical to what Sears, JCPenney, and scores of direct-mail apparel companies built their businesses on throughout the twentieth century. You get the product into the customer's hands before the transaction is complete. You reduce purchase friction by eliminating the need to evaluate the product in a store. You extend the brand relationship into the home, where the customer can try the frames in their own bathroom mirror rather than under fluorescent retail lighting. The format is different — it is actual product samples rather than a printed catalog — but the underlying consumer behavior logic is the same.

BDMA 5G: Beam Division Multiple Access Explained

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Beam Division Multiple Access

Beam Division Multiple Access (BDMA) is an access technique developed for fifth-generation (5G) mobile wireless communication systems. It uses separate, spatially directed beams to target subscribers in different regions, allowing multiple users to be served simultaneously on the same frequency.

The Problem BDMA Solves

As mobile networks evolve from 4G to 5G, one of the central challenges is supporting a massive increase in connected devices and data throughput without a proportional increase in spectrum. Traditional multiple access techniques — FDMA (frequency division), TDMA (time division), CDMA (code division), and OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division) — divide resources in frequency, time, or code domains.

BDMA Study Section (NIH): Biodata Management and Analysis

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Biodata Management and Analysis

Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) is a study section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) within the Center for Scientific Review (CSR). It is part of the Biodata and Bioinformatics and Biotechnology (BBBT) cluster under the Division of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIB).

What Is an NIH Study Section?

NIH study sections are panels of scientific experts who perform peer review of grant applications submitted to the NIH. Each study section focuses on a specific scientific area, evaluating applications for scientific merit before funding decisions are made.

Big Data Marketing Analytics (BDMA): Personalized Marketing

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Big Data Marketing Analytics

Big Data Marketing Analytics (BDMA) is the use of big data to improve marketing decision-making. By collecting and analyzing vast amounts of information about customers, products, and markets, organizations can create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

What Makes It "Big Data"?

Traditional marketing analytics worked with surveys, focus groups, and sales reports — relatively small, structured datasets. Big data marketing analytics operates at a fundamentally different scale, drawing on:

British Damage Management Association (BDMA) – UK Trade Body

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

British Damage Management Association

The British Damage Management Association (BDMA) marked a milestone in relations between the insurance industry and those who provide recovery and restoration services in the United Kingdom.

Modern damage management involves highly technical disciplines. The industry is traditionally intensely competitive, covering services such as:

Water damage restoration — drying, dehumidification, and structural drying after floods or leaks
Fire and smoke damage recovery — cleaning, deodorizing, and restoring properties after fire
Mould remediation — identifying and removing hazardous mould growth
Storm damage repair — rapid response to wind, hail, and weather-related damage

The creation of the BDMA indicated the significance that damage management practitioners attach to the establishment and maintenance of uniform standards of care and codes of practice, underpinned by technical and corporate training.

Britt David Magnet Academy (BDMA) – Magnet School Columbus

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Britt David Magnet Academy

Britt David Magnet Academy (BDMA) is a public magnet school located in Columbus, Georgia. It offers advanced college preparatory and career technical education programs to students seeking a rigorous academic environment.

What Is a Magnet School?

Magnet schools are public schools with specialized curricula designed to attract students from across a school district — not just from the immediate neighborhood. The "magnet" concept draws students with a focused academic theme, often in STEM, arts, or career and technical education (CTE).

Brain Disease Model of Addiction (BDMA) Addiction Medicine

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Brain Disease Model of Addiction (BDMA)

The Brain Disease Model of Addiction (BDMA) is a theoretical framework that conceptualizes addiction — to substances such as alcohol, opioids, cocaine, or nicotine — as a chronic disorder of the brain, rather than a moral failing or a matter of willpower alone. It has become the dominant paradigm in addiction medicine and neuroscience, and significantly shapes clinical practice, research funding, and public policy.

BenzylDiMethylAmine (BDMA): Epoxy Catalyst & Curing Agent

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BenzylDiMethylAmine (BDMA)

BenzylDiMethylAmine (BDMA), also written as benzyl dimethylamine or N,N-dimethylbenzylamine, is an organic chemical compound with the molecular formula C₉H₁₃N. It is widely used in industrial chemistry as a catalyst and curing accelerator, most notably in epoxy resin systems.

Chemical Properties

BDMA belongs to the class of tertiary amines — nitrogen-containing compounds where the nitrogen atom is bonded to three carbon-containing groups rather than hydrogen atoms. Its structure combines a benzyl group (a benzene ring attached via a methylene bridge) with two methyl groups on the nitrogen.

Botswana Diamond Manufacturers Association (BDMA) Overview

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Botswana Diamond Manufacturers Association

The Botswana Diamond Manufacturers Association (BDMA) is a non-profit organization established in 2007 that represents the voice of Botswana's diamond cutting and polishing industry. It serves as the collective body for manufacturers operating in one of the world's most significant diamond-producing nations.

Botswana and the Diamond Industry

Botswana is consistently ranked among the top diamond-producing countries in the world by both volume and value. The country's diamond sector, anchored by the Jwaneng and Orapa mines operated through Debswana — a joint venture between the government and De Beers — has been the cornerstone of Botswana's economic development since the 1970s.

Big Data Management and Analytics (BDMA) — Master's Program

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Big Data Management and Analytics — The BDMA Master's Program

Big Data Management and Analytics (BDMA) is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's Degree program that fully covers all data management and analytics aspects of big data, built on top of business intelligence (BI) foundations and complemented with horizontal skills.

What Is the BDMA Master's Program?

The BDMA program is a joint degree offered by a consortium of leading European universities. It is designed for students who want to become specialists in managing and extracting value from large-scale data, combining theoretical foundations with practical skills that industry demands.

BDMA Meaning — All Acronym Definitions in One Place

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to bdma.org

BDMA can stand for a number of things, depending on the context. Here are the most common meanings:

British Damage Management Association (BDMA): The BDMA marked a milestone in relations between the insurance industry and those who provide recovery and restoration services. Modern damage management involves highly technical disciplines and the industry is traditionally intensely competitive. The creation of the BDMA indicated the significance damage management practitioners attach to the establishment and maintenance of uniform standards of care and codes of practice, underpinned by technical and corporate training.