Through what we wear, we can tell a lot about ourselves. Our personality, our values, our origin, our social class, our religion. But there is one issue that unites people, above all differences – our mutual wish to save the planet. This film encourages us to break all the rules in fashion as long as we remember one thing: to recycle our clothes.

To get this message across, we cast interesting people from around the globe who somehow epitomised rule-breaking. Pioneers who could stir an interest through their own underlying story of breaking the conventions or violating norms.

The diverse cast of 33 individuals from five continents brought several PR angles that helped the main story. These came from the geographical dispersion, the different subcultural aspects or through the social networks of the cast.

To generate maximum engagement through a genuine interest – from both ordinary people and journalists – we used a technique that mixes a lot of different topics, trends and influencers, giving us the opportunity to be as relevant as possible.

Therefore, a large part of the PR work was done in the production and strategy – finding the right people to feature in the film as well as the right subjects and conflicts. Each person or topic who was selected had its own potential PR angle or news story.

When launching the film, we used H&M’s own channels and one single press release. Simultaneously, all the participants distributed the film along with behind-the-scenes material, specially made for each media platform, to all their fans and followers. This resulted in the campaign being featured in almost 2 800 news articles around the world and going viral in a truly organic way.

The film alone has had over 10 million views on YouTube and Facebook – and has been featured on nearly 70 television and radio segments, including news outlets like BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera.

2 800 news articles have been written about the campaign worldwide, for example editorial pieces in The New York Times, The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Fashion magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan have also covered the campaign.

Overall, the campaign has generated over 1 million organic shares on Facebook and 2 million engagements in social media.

How well the campaign achieved its goals was followed closely through social media monitoring tools to observe how the message was received on all different markets. We observed two major peaks of engagement, one during the launch of the campaign and the other a month later focusing on one of the diversity questions brought up in the film.