To achieve the above objectives, we developed Canadian Apparel, a three-day pop-up in a freshly abandoned American Apparel space. We completely hijacked the abandoned store, reappropriated and rebranded every aspect of it from the storefront signage to shopping bags, and then opened up the world’s first Canadian Apparel as a temporary pop-up shop on Queen St. West in downtown Toronto’s Fashion District, one of North America’s busiest and trendiest hubs for retail

First we took over the freshly abandoned American Apparel space. From there we rebranded every possible aspect. That included a disruptive takeover of the iconic neon sign, a whole new skin of vinyl window and wall decals, the hacking of all interior signage, and finally putting in our own stickers and branded bags. From there, we invited 9 other brands that exclusively manufacture goods in Canada, fostering the small but dedicated collection of like-minded brands and leveraging their pre-existing followings. We also developed social media marketing materials for Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. And finally, we opened the doors to the media, the design community, and the people. In terms of timeline, placement, and scale, the store was open from Friday, February 24th to Sunday, February 26th in American Apparel’s massive former flagship store in downtown Toronto in the heart of Queen St. West, a renown North American fashion/retail hubs.

The event saw 1 customer enter the store every 34 seconds and 1 product sold every 17 minutes, outpacing category/area benchmarks. This sparked the brand’s best weekend of sales ever and a 400% spike in website traffic. The following week then delivered the strongest sales in a year. The event was covered by international fashion authorities, national news channels, local culture publications, plus bloggers, vloggers and influencers, earning 9,000,000+ media impressions and 1,000,000+ social media views.

Beyond numbers, the response far exceeded expectations. Any passerby stopped and gawked at the revamped space, with a startling number disrupting their plans and entering. Further, people online and in real life continually discussed the importance of and admiration for Canadian-made brands. And finally, we received and continue to receive an outpouring of requests to extend and/or revive the space, with many people explicitly encouraging us to make Canadian Apparel a permanent store.

The Canadian Apparel pop-up literally brought the predominantly online brand – ONEMETH Goods – to life. Previously, over 90% of the brand’s sales were online, and this campaign/event/idea sparked a tangible experience for consumers, enabling them to physically interact with the product in a way that they hadn’t done before. And because the key differentiator of the brand is that it is actually made in Canada, the entire experience was designed continually promoted this unique aspect of the brand, celebrating this particular aspect of ONEMETH Goods, and Canadian made products in general.

Our strategy was fairly simple. We studied a wide variety of competitors lookbooks and realized that the very format, photo and video, was almost always the same. From there we knew we could challenge that. And when looking at our target audience, it was clear that whatever we did would need to be universally accessible. That meant something like Google Glass or some elaborate isolated stunt wouldn’t cut it. That all led us to Google Maps, a globally used platform that everyone understands and uses. Our approach was to blend our traditional lookbook, which people already understand, with Google Maps, another thing that people already understand, to develop something that anyone and everyone can instantly get.

ONEMETH Goods is a Canadian-made streetwear brand that has been slowing growing an audience since 2014. Early this year they were looking to elevate their sales and awareness, specifically for their Spring/Summer 2017 collection. Considering 2017 is Canada’s 150th birthday, and that Canada/America relations were under a microscope, and that American Apparel just announced their bankruptcy, we developed an idea that would cause a whole lot of new people to discover the brand, to realize that they were uniquely made in Canada, and to hopefully purchase some product.