You can sometimes jump through hoops to come up with an idea to land a launch.
And sometimes the most obvious and simple ideas just come to you and then, lo and behold, work beautifully.
This one fell into the latter camp.
Having worked with IKEA for the last six months or so to ensure that their collaboration with Virgil Abloh would land coverage across the media.
Of course, there were the preview pieces of the collection for media, which landed far and wide.
There were splendid collection preview pieces across the fashion titles – like these in Wonderland, Refinery 29 and Vogue.
There were gems across the trend and culture sites – take, for example these glorious write-ups in Culture Whisper, Hype Beast, High Snobiety (several times over).
Just to ensure a healthy enough spread, there were also crackers in the homes and interiors titles – the likes of House & Garden, Homes & Property and House Beautiful.
Then we, as an all agency-group, were asked to come up with some cunning plans to ensure that the launch would be written up by news pages and would help ensure that IKEA itself was central to the story – and that the collaboration came across as just that.
So it was that we did two things. Both simple. Both effective.
First up, Mother managed to convince the brand to change its logo for the first time in its history. We added Abloh’s iconic speech marks to the logo on the Wembley Store – to create “IKEA” and mark the collection.
Meantime, we decided that, if people were going to queue at “IKEA” to wait to pick up pieces from the new collection, it should be the comfiest queue ever. Complete with sofas, cushions, blankets. Just to ensure that the rest of the “IKEA” collection was showcased.
The combination of those two additions led to some belting coverage on the day of the launch with gorgeous pieces across The Guardian, Daily Mirror, Hypebeast, Hypebae, Fast Company, Design Taxi and Dazed & Confused.
So there you have it. Coverage across the widest spread of media. All putting IKEA front-and-centre.
Oh, and it was with great pleasure that we spotted that Abloh himself thought our little stunt was good enough to share …
