Press Releases
Smead Manufacturing Company Sponsors SIMPLE LIVING television series (May 2004)
Author, expert Wanda Urbanska to provide PBS viewers across America with ways to simplify their lives in exciting new series
Hastings, Minn. (May 17, 2004) – Smead Manufacturing Company today announced the company’s exclusive corporate sponsorship of SIMPLE LIVING WITH WANDA URBANSKA, a new series that will be offered to PBS stations nationwide starting in July 2004. The series is being distributed through Executive Program Services, EPS. The series of eight thirty-minute programs, hosted by nationally recognized simplicity author and expert Wanda Urbanska, will be available to PBS stations across the country for a two-year period. The light-hearted series attempts to motivate viewers to become better environmental stewards, more thoughtful consumers, achieve greater community involvement and greater financial responsibility.
“As a manufacturer and marketer of filing systems and records management products in the United States and Europe, Smead understands the value of simplicity at work and at home,” said Sharon Hoffman Avent, Smead president and CEO. “Throughout her career, Wanda Urbanska has been committed to leading Americans toward a simpler, more meaningful life, and we believe that Wanda’s message resonates with the Smead mission. Our advertising message is ‘Organize your work; simplify your life.’”
SIMPLE LIVING WITH WANDA URBANSKA is a sometimes-zany look at the cluttered, time-pressured world in which Americans live today. A how-to program, the show offers viewers actionable solutions that will help them to save energy, money and precious resources, including time. The program ends with a segment that has been popular in focus groups called “The Thing That Refused to Die,” which focuses on items that people have taken care of beyond the date of planned obsolescence.
Wanda Urbanska is the author of co-author with Frank Levering of numerous books, including Simple Living: One Couple’s Search for a Better Life, Moving to a Small Town: A Guidebook for Moving from Urban to Rural America and the forthcoming, Nothing’s Too Small to Make a Difference, which will be published by John F. Blair, Publisher, this August. Wanda has appeared on Oprah, the Today show, CBS This Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered, and many more. The New York Times called her “a spokeswoman for the simplicity movement.” The Seattle Times called Urbanska “one of Voluntary Simplicity’s biggest stars.” Wanda hosted the nationally broadcast, PBS primetime hit special, Escape from Affluenza. Frank Levering is executive producer of the program and scriptwriter for the shows. Urbanska and Levering live with their son Henry in Mount Airy, NC (hometown of Any Griffith) and fun a family cherry orchard in Carroll County, VA.
The series has been shot throughout the country in ten states including North Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, Louisiana, Minnesota and California. Series producers project broadcasts by PBS stations covering at least 50 percent of U.S. TV households in its initial run.
Smead Manufacturing Company manufactures and markets filing systems and records management products for large and small businesses as well as for individual and home office use. Founded in 1906, Smead is a leading worldwide provider of office filing and records management supplies in North America and Europe. Smead is a privately held, majority woman-owned business.