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Northfell · Manchester, England
A rejection of the summit photograph, and the shop that had to be rebuilt to support it.
Northfell makes hard-wearing waterproofs for people who walk in British weather, and had spent six years marketing them with photography of people on mountains in good light. Its actual customers were, by its own returns data, mostly walking to work. The brand was competing on aspiration with companies that had forty times its media budget.
Nobody buys a waterproof for the summit. They buy it for the walk back to the car.
The category sells escape. Northfell’s customers were not escaping anywhere — they were commuting, walking dogs, standing on touchlines. Every competitor was fighting over the two per cent of days that photograph well. The other three hundred and fifty were unclaimed, and Northfell already made the right product for them.
The campaign uses bad weather as its art direction rather than its obstacle: everything is shot wet, grey and flat, with the product legible and the location deliberately ordinary. The type system is set in a heavy grotesque that holds up at small sizes on a rain-covered phone screen, which is where most of the media was actually seen.
The site rebuild and the campaign launched eight weeks apart, which makes attribution between them impossible and we have not attempted it. What can be said cleanly is that the product pages now answer the questions the customer service inbox used to answer, and the brand has a position that its media budget can actually defend.
Lumaire is a fictional company created for a HubZero Blueprint. The figures above are illustrative demonstration content, not measured results.
The uncomfortable part was being shown our own returns data next to our own campaign photography. We could not un-see it after that.
Next step
Northfell came to us with a version of the same problem most of our clients have: something specific and true that had stopped being said clearly.