Since its beginnings as a digitally native women’s clothing brand, ModCloth had mostly portrayed real women (and members of its community) while pushing for diversity, before it became a trend. Additionally, it was one of the first fashion brands to subscribe to the non-photoshop pledge when showcasing their product. They’ve also always included what many brands refer to as “plus-size” as part of its everyday offering.

However, multiple shifts in brand identity diluted the once-cult brand, resulting in weakened relevance. The brand was too indistinct to draw new shoppers into its pipeline, yet its quirky aesthetic was viewed as not versatile or wearable enough to drive sales (even amongst loyalists). To accelerate brand growth through awareness gains and increased sales goals, as required by ModCloth’s new parent company Walmart, the brand needed to become more accessible.

After a rigorous strategic process to reframe ModCloth, understand its mod values (community, democracy, populism), and establish its role in the lives of our self-expressive and body positive consumers, we landed on a new mission: “outfit originality.”

Our final mandate was to bring this mission to life through a transformative platform moment, calling upon and activating unconventional spirits to join the ModCloth community.

Most fashion brands claim to stand for gender, body diversity and inclusion but still let skinny models dominate their catwalks. Rail-thin mannequins crowd store windows, heavily retouched images populate advertising, and clothing sizes too small for the average American woman hang from racks everywhere.

And while many brands are using diverse models, they are still treating women as faceplates to sell their clothing. ModCloth is pioneering a current movement in fashion—not just to cast diverse models, but celebrate the spirit within women. ModCloth has made it fashionable to celebrate the triumphs over obstacles that women face to make them the multidimensional, multi-faceted, unique beings that they are. Rather than just dressing bodies, ModCloth dresses the woman. Highlighting real women in their marketing, telling real stories about their community, and celebrating real women whose beauty shines beyond their appearance because of their life journeys and accomplishments.

ModCloth’s “Four Walks” is an anthem to authenticity and diversity—a celebration of four women who faced the obstacles along their path to becoming their true selves and today inspire and lead other women by example. The campaign empowers women to rebel against narrow beauty standards and instead celebrates them for their differences and their journeys.

For Spring 2019, ModCloth launched “Against the Current,” a campaign that celebrates all those who live and dress against the current.

At the center was “Four Walks”, a four-minute documentary short that told the stories of how four women (Awkwafina, Dascha Polanco, Halsey and Hari Nef) overcame the obstacles they’ve faced in their lives to embrace the most authentic version of themselves. In this piece, we merged interview footage that adds context around their personal stories with four fashion films that depict each woman battling against nature’s elements as a visual representation of the real-life challenges they’ve overcome.

The short was dedicated to those who live against the current, which the cast reflected - a teenage mother who refused to be a statistic, a multifaceted artist struggling with industry conventions, a transgender model searching for positivity and self-love, and an Asian-American comedian who defied stereotypes.

Our strategic goal was to celebrate uniqueness through attitude and aesthetic. For this reason, the casting was key. Since brand awareness was so low, we wanted to break through the clutter by associating the brand with highly recognizable talent that is both appealing to the audience and surprising in regards to association with the brand. We also wanted to honor the brand’s core values of body positivity and inclusivity, so we made sure to represent diversity across age, race, body size and style.

The brand is all about authenticity. Since their inception, they’ve never used photoshop for body retouching when showing product on models. For this reason, we wanted the campaign to pay homage to that authenticity and thought a documentary short best allowed each woman to tell her story in her own words.

We knew that we had to place the documentary short somewhere with scale and impact, so we took over the YouTube Masthead in 3 markets (US, Canada, and Australia) in order to do so. Over the course of the first day (March 10), the film received over 11.4 million views, successfully exposing the brand to a much broader audience than it had ever reached before. We used cutdowns of the four fashion films for a three-week flight on broadcast television - the first time ModCloth had ever used broadcast media to promote the brand. We also created cutdowns for the brand and talent to post on their social channels. Additionally, we created a suite of video and still assets that worked to support a paid media plan including national US broadcast, digital, social, and retail, with an OOH station domination and billboards in NYC.

While we are only a few weeks removed from the launch, the focus was to positively affect brand awareness. In the first 24 hours after launch, the documentary short achieved 11,410,448 total views, making it the highest viewed asset in the brand’s history. The documentary reached 55M unique people in the US with women (25-34) contributing to over 12.7% of overall reach. Also, subscribers to ModCloth’s owned YouTube channel increased by 108%.

Additionally, through PR, we targeted audiences associated with each woman’s journey across film, music, and television, effectively widening the aperture of who ModCloth has historically reached with their communications.