In China’s sprint forward, cultural arts and crafts that are essential to China's identity are in need of preservation. Craftsmen and women faced low awareness, and the inability to pass on their knowledge. Airbnb launched Lost&Found, an initiative that placed over 100 masters on our Airbnb platform to offer their craft to our global travel community. Travelers looking for local activities are offered apprenticeships from these masters. With over 119 million impressions, the amount of applications lead to an increase of 400% of their heritages while sparking a national debate on preservation.

In Chinese, for Lost & Found, we used the character ? (su) which means “ to go back to the beginning, to find rediscover” and ? (cheng) which means “being handed over, inheriting something” together these two words in Chinese create a deeper more traditional meaning of “Connecting the past with the future”.

This informed the design concept, creating a new Chinese character as our campaign title, that is design by blending two different characters.

Lost & Found is all about rediscovery.The campaign’s styling was calibrated to bring an old romance back into the everyday that was ignored, fading or forgotten. From prints, posters, our digital portal, to our film: every apprenticeship was stylized as an available journey that was memorable and timeless, just like a classic film you would select.

As old as the history of our apprenticeships, for our campaign title, Airbnb has done research in century old Chinese typesetting, and was inspired by the ancient moveable type printing, style called "Song", that we have simplified, and redesigned. We then uniquely merged the two characters, emphasizing the connection between people and their heritage.

Throughout the campaign we used empty working chairs as a recurring theme. Every chair was a real piece of their furniture where their students use to sit. The empty spot is Airbnb's invitation to our audiences.