Jansport is a well-known brand with a unique problem: Our target had a positive opinion of JanSport backpacks—But after high school, people would tend to move on from JanSport and 'graduate' to a different bag brand. We wanted to make JanSport relevant again to tastemaking 20 to 30 year olds by reminding them of what they had always loved about the brand growing up and get them interacting with the brand in way that felt genuine and not contrived. We decided to take backpack doodling to the next level with the 'Reclaimed Art Canvas' project.

The goal of the reclaimed art project was simple: Take the nostalgia of drawing and writing on your backpack to a whole other level. And create a unique line of backpacks.

We set out to Bonnaroo, the 4-day music and art festival in Tennessee, to put up huge blank canvases-the same canvas used to make JanSport packs- and let anyone who wanted to go town with paints, markers and other art supplies. The end result was fourteen colorful murals that then became a limited edition run of Bonnaroo JanSport backpacks.Over 4 days, we documented the entire process and pointed our artists to our Reclaimed Art Canvas online gallery (www.jansportartcanvas.com), where they could go and view the completed canvases and actually tag and comment on their own artwork. After the festival, we brought the finished canvases back to the JanSport headquarters where they were cut apart and sewn into backpacks.

So far 15,500 people have visited the site since it launched and 350 people have tagged a canvas.We’ll be returning to Bonnaroo in 2010 and expanding the Reclaimed Art Canvas to other large festivals like SXSW, Coachella and Lollapalooza.