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FILSON | HOLIDAY CAMPAIGN | WINTER 2022
FILSON HOLIDAY CAMPAIGN
CAMPAIGN IDENTITY
The holidays are the most important time of year for any retail brand. But what happens when the initial plan doesn’t work out?
As a retail brand, the holiday season is the most important time of the year for Filson’s business. The Filson brand and the holidays are an iconic pairing – picture rustic cabins, red and black buffalo-check patterned wool wearing, bearded mountain men (Santa, is that you?), snow-capped fir trees all around – Filson might as well have invented the old-school, cabin-cozy aesthetic.
In late 2022, the plan for the big holiday campaign hit a few major snags. The photo shoot didn’t go as planned and was ultimately scrapped, product shifts from pandemic supply chain problems were still affecting merchandising, and the senior designer in charge of the campaign ended up taking a longer leave of absence than planned. As the now most senior digital designer on Filson’s creative team, I was suddenly responsible for picking up the scattered pieces of what was left of the holiday campaign and stringing them back together.
As a retail brand, the holiday season is the most important time of the year for Filson’s business. The Filson brand and the holidays are an iconic pairing – picture rustic cabins, red and black buffalo-check patterned wool wearing, bearded mountain men (Santa, is that you?), snow-capped fir trees all around – Filson might as well have invented the old-school, cabin-cozy aesthetic.
In late 2022, the plan for the big holiday campaign hit a few major snags. The photo shoot didn’t go as planned and was ultimately scrapped, product shifts from pandemic supply chain problems were still affecting merchandising, and the senior designer in charge of the campaign ended up taking a longer leave of absence than planned. As the now most senior digital designer on Filson’s creative team, I was suddenly responsible for picking up the scattered pieces of what was left of the holiday campaign and stringing them back together.
1/1
With little more than a month to put together our biggest campaign of the year, I took a look at what I had to work with. The digital gift guide the e-commerce team was requesting consisted of a main landing page and ten gift guide category pages, all with corresponding email and social assets. I needed a main hero image for the landing page, and ten images to represent the gift guides.
Luckily our studio was able to organize a pick-up shoot of our products and a few additional images that worked nicely alongside our Winter campaign photography. The resident taxidermied elk at the studio, as well as a handsome shot of our videographer’s husky became our campaign heroes. To keep the overall feel of the campaign consistent, the studio images stayed in color, while the campaign imagery needed to fill any gaps were flipped to black and white with a slight sepia overtone.
Given those images to work with, I chose a color palette that was in step with Filson’s core brand colors but still had an upscale holiday feel (a deep forest green matched with the brand’s primary Newspaper Grey and tertiary gold color). These colors felt classic and tied all of the imagery together, even though they came from multiple sources.
To make the campaign feel even more elevated and special, I worked with our web team to get a serif font licensed for the website by showing them a comparison of what the headings looked like in Filson’s core Futura font vs. the more handsome and sophisticated GT Alpina.
LANDING PAGE - DESKTOP
MOBILE
GIFT GUIDE PAGE - DESKTOP
MOBILE
PAID SOCIAL ADVERTISING
Even though it was a huge undertaking, and my first campaign art direction for Filson, the whole project came together beautifully and (more importantly) on time. The campaign’s launch email was a hit, generating +88% growth from the previous year’s launch. The omni-channel marketing approach used email and paid advertising to bring customers to the gift guide landing page, and every asset’s design was tied together with the identity I brought to life.
While the original plan may have fallen through, I was able to piece together a campaign that fits the Filson brand, and will set an example for future holiday campaigns.
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