Our campaign launched at an intense time for women. The scale of sexual harassment across industries was just surfacing, and the #MeToo movement was starting. Conversations around unrealistic beauty standards and diversity were driving change in the beauty, fashion, and other industries.

Female empowerment messaging was at a high, and a must for female-focused brands, especially beauty brands. But many took a serious, worthy tone when addressing female empowerment. Covergirl had just changed their iconic slogan from “Easy Breezy Beautiful” to “I Am What I Make Up.” These were messages women could get behind, but we wanted to do something different.

Jane Park, Julep’s founder, created Julep to shed beauty industry standards and give women an enjoyable, no-judgement beauty experience. Julep’s promise is #BravePretty: “Pretty isn’t something we define for you, it’s whatever you choose to show us.”

With this background, Julep was primed to create a campaign that empowered yet also was enjoyable, didn’t take itself too seriously, and made beauty fun - even funny. “Throw Anything At Me” invited women to celebrate their “bring-it-on” attitude while facing challenges - from the serious to the basic - and makeup’s role in it, to disrupt the current empowerment conversation.

Being a woman today is often coupled with expectation and anxiety and the beauty industry offers no relief. So, we created a campaign that celebrates how women handle everything that is thrown at them each day -- by actually throwing things at them, and letting them kick the crap out of them!

We turned women’s most cited frustrations into physical objects to punch and kick. From salads, to bras, from catcallers to ticking biological clock bombs, you can leap and destroy it all.

The campaign consisted of a robust research study, a video, an influencer program, and a first-person video game that allows you to pummel these annoyances, pressures and challenges. You can even play as a man to have a “different” experience.

The result was fun and cathartic, and sparked conversation and press mentions… not to mention, promo redemptions.

WEB-FILM: Instead of working with a typical beauty director, we partnered with Alex Prager, a young female fine artist whose work revolves around women’s roles in art and entertainment. This gave our film a very different feeling than most beauty ads, and helped us bring our heroine to life in a way that was both stylish, cool, fun and fresh for the category.

VIDEO GAME: Using data from a national survey of women, we created a video and a first person video game that allows you to fight the challenges thrown at women every day. We turned what women said get thrown at them into physical objects. From salads, to bras, from catcallers to ticking biological clock bombs, your chosen avatar leaps and kicks the crap out of all of them. You can even play as a man to have a “different” experience.

The campaign received many positive mentions and overall positive sentiment around the game and film, with women commenting and sharing how the in jokes driven by data resonated with them, made then enjoy playing the game, and see Julep as a brand that gets them.

Overall, 64% of visitors to the Julep campaign website played the game and the film exceeded expected video views by over 62% with 400,000+ views and counting. At the end of game play, players received a promo code to shop Julep.com and redemptions exceeded our goals by 70%. The campaign was also covered in Refinery29, People, WWD, and CNN, as well as Adweek and AdAge.

We conducted a national online survey of American women 18-44 to understand the impact of a variety of pressures faced by women and the role makeup and skincare play in their lives.

We found that 72% of women felt the pressure of unrealistic beauty standards. Yet, the same number of women (70%) also felt putting on makeup actually bolstered their confidence to deal with such pressures. We were fascinated by this tension of women seeing makeup as a confidence-booster but also another obstacle to face. We wanted to reflect this in a relatable way.

A second round of questions dug deeper into which issues were struggled with most, allowing us to select the most resonant (i.e. “in joke”) items to inform our campaign - from unwanted sexual advances to career inequality, unrealistic beauty standards to domestic stereotypes and social pressures.

Julep Cosmetics was founded by a female CEO on the belief that beauty should be a fun, judgment-free experience that empowers women. And while Julep isn’t a completely new brand, it lacked the awareness of most of its competitors. The brief was to create Julep’s first brand campaign targeted at women 18-44 with a culturally charged point of view that would resonate with them.

We were at a peak in the diversity conversation in beauty and the start of the #MeToo movement, and we noticed the beauty category was jumping on the empowerment bandwagon in a solemn, worthy way at every turn. There wasn’t a beauty brand out there talking to women in a real, honest, lighthearted way. And women like to laugh, too! We felt Julep could fill that space - bringing a fun, relatable perspective to the conversation with a breakthrough idea. The objective of the campaign would be to drive awareness, social conversation, and purchases on Julep.com.