In late 2020, we established a new creative department, repositioning the organization as a full-service agency.

With the holidays about a month away from the creative briefing, we wanted to develop a greeting card to send to current clients that would:

• acknowledge the year that we've all been through

• bring a little lightness and joy to our clients when we couldn't have traditional holiday celebrations

• showcase our organization's new creative capabilities.

Our budget to reach 150 clients in the United States and Canada was $2,000 USD.

As the year’s end approached, people felt anything but festive. We are an agency built on personal relationships, but with the pandemic restrictions, we couldn’t celebrate with clients in-person.

Still, we wanted to share a little joy — from a safe distance.

With an audience of marketers ranging from management level to Chief Marketing Officer, we’d need more than your typical holiday greeting to showcase our capabilities.

Instead of trying to distract from a dreadful 2020, we would help them wash their hands of the year with a series of dissolving soap sheets. Each sheet featured a different mundane misery from the year, such as marathon Zoom meetings, DIY haircuts or perpetual pivoting. Just choose a sheet and add water to lather up and see your 2020 troubles wash down the drain.

Soap sheet manufacturers advised us that it was impossible to produce printed soap sheets. So we looked into how soap sheets are made. We prototyped a proof-of-concept at home, then worked closely with the printer to produce a new custom-message soap sheet product.

The mailing featured our new branding, and included a package of 15 different soap sheets and a greeting card sent in a plastic bubble envelope.

The soap sheets were made from 3mil dissolving paper printed on a Heidelberg press then silkscreened with an unscented soap. After drying, the sheets were cut and hand-assembled into packages.

The 24pt card stock greeting card served triple-duty. It conveyed holiday greetings, acted as a protective envelope-stiffener, and included a complete list of the different miseries so one could easily choose their most-loathed 2020 moment.

It was the first holiday card sent by us since its inception, and it was very well received.

The new look of us was reaching our audience – several clients reached back to us to compliment us on the inventiveness and creativity of the piece. And while the piece was not intended to drive response, it did so anyway.

In addition to the card, we developed a video of the soap sheet holiday card to be shared on social media. This extended reach of the piece to generate +1500 views, significantly extending the presence of a campaign that otherwise would have reached only 150 people.