Bears are the only animals that sleep all winter without having to shit. So the first bear shit marks the end of winter and the start of our sales. That`s why we started a big promotion around this marvelous feat of bear biology.

In partnership with the Swiss Nature Park Goldau, we began our integrated campaign by leading people to a microsite where they could guess when Evi the bear would wake up and have her first poo. Whoever guessed the exact date would win a Helly Hansen voucher and a yearly pass to the Nature Park.

On March 22nd Evi woke up and shat. We collected her valuable assets and invited the public to the big weighing event. Why? The size of the sale discount would be directly determined by the weight of Evi`s poo. 420 grams meant customers would receive a 42% discount at our winter sale.

Talking about shit is kind of difficult. Thats why we decided to have a very distinctive visual world with high-end post-production. A funny and cute key-visual of a shitting bear and a microsite designed with hand lettering, icons and nature photography.

We started our campaign by asking people when Evi the bear will wake and have her first shit. Poster, Digital Boards, Facebook Post and other media in whole Switzerland led to the microsite where people could guess the exact date when Evi will wake up.

The weighing event was the next level of the campaign, followed by the big Helly Hansen winter sale..

Helly Hansen had a 48% sales increase compared to the last winter sale and the Nature Park Goldau had three times more visitors than usual at this time of the year. The microsite had more than 20.000 visitors in the first two weeks of the promotion and more than 5.000 people took part in the competition, which is a fantastic result in a small country like Switzerland. The intense media interest in the campaign also resulted in a strong growth of the brand awareness for both clients.