Instead of kicking off the holiday shopping season with traditional product-led or promotional campaigns, Canadian fashion retailer, Simons, embarked on a journey to create a long-standing piece of art inspired by the brand ethos of celebrating beauty and humanity that got people to think and behave differently. They wanted to use the privilege of their voice and platform to create something meaningful — not commercial — to inspire people to see their world differently.

Simons has been a beloved fashion retailer in Quebec, Canada for over 180 years. This past holiday season, the brand wanted to forgo a traditional sales campaign and instead use their voice and the privilege they have to speak and create everyday to provide more meaningful commentary on the world. The result would be the first “art” instalment of a multi-year platform that would transform people’s perspective and facilitate societal change for good.

The years leading up to this campaign were a particularly dark time in society. With a never ending loop of bad news, it was easy to only see the world as one-dimensional, full of sadness, ugliness, and destruction. But there is beauty lingering just below the surface if you are strong and courageous enough to look for it. And finding beauty in the most difficult moments can lead to understanding, empathy, generosity, hope, and human connection.

The new platform, “All is Beauty”, was created to inspire the act of finding beauty in all of life’s moments, both positive and classically challenging. To launch, a short film captured the real-life immersive experience between a dying woman and her friends. It was a celebration of our heroes’ favourite moments and the most cherished chapters of her life to provoke conversation around her desire to focus on the beauty, not the tragedy, in life and bring that beauty to other people—even as she neared the end. This was to be her message, her unedited words, and Simons was simply providing the platform.

The film project was a unique and emotionally complex challenge of creating a memorable experience for a person in their final days.

To reinforce the platform concept and honour Jennyfer's desire to fill her last breaths with beauty and truth, we created an intensely personal and emotional send-off experience centring around the most cherished moments in her life.

​​​​We created themed tableaus set in the natural landscape of Tofino, B.C. far from the clinical hospital setting of most goodbyes, and let everything unfold in real time while quietly documenting Jennyfer’s experience of music, nature, and beauty with her friends.

We compiled the film’s voiceover from multiple hours of unscripted interviews, mirroring Simon's philosophy of gratitude for life & focusing on the beauty of every moment.

Simons’ “All is Beauty” campaign ran for four weeks, garnered over one million views on YouTube and sparked conversation about our existence–what it means to live and die, and how we can honour the (sometimes brutal) beauty of our life, as well as a brand’s role in participating and shaping culture. Discussions flooded Twitter and international news outlets like the National Post, Daily Mail, CTV News, the Globe & Mail, and New York Post covered the story, including a three-and-a-half minute conversation on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News that resulted in exposing the uglier side of humanity and ironically also exposing the beauty that surrounds us, even in the darkest of moments.

The world feels like it is facing insurmountable challenges. In fact, consumer research suggests that people believe that we are in our worst moment in recent human history—a global virus, war, environmental collapse, economic hardship, that are both ugly and destructive. And with highly polarized social factions, coming to an agreement between two groups or people becomes impossible with little empathy, acknowledgement, or understanding from either side. It’s more important than ever that we seek to change our perspective, or at least walk a minute in someone else’ shoes.

Medical assistance in dying (MAiD) became a legal medical procedure in Canada in 2016. In 2021 the law was changed to allow those with non-terminal physical conditions to choose an assisted death.