2017 Silver Anvil Winner Highlight: Savers’ Rethink Reuse Campaign

PRSAAs fast fashion continues to grow in popularity – we now buy four times more garments than we did 30 years ago – the clothing industry has become of the world’s biggest polluters. For example, it can take over 700 gallons of water to make one cotton T-shirt, and North Americans throw away over 26 billion pounds of clothing each year.Savers, the for-profit, global thrift retailer, worked with Edelman to create the Rethink Reuse campaign to shed light on the environmental impact of the clothing industry and let people know about the small steps they can take — through shopping smart and donating clothing — to offset their fashion footprint.While Savers typically speaks to a core group of thrift shoppers and donors who give to its nonprofit partners, Edelman set out to enlist a new group of like-minded, socially-engaged people, chiefly millennials, to ignite change.As part of the research process, Edelman partnered with Savers to commission the State of Reuse Report, which shed light on the barriers that persist about donating and buying used goods and the educational opportunities to correct those misperceptions.They found that while millennials love both fashion and the environment, they didn’t connect the two to realize the impact of their clothing decisions on the environment.The campaign needed to reach millennials in a meaningful way to spotlight the consequences of their shopping habits. As reuse is Savers’ reason for being, Rethink Reuse became the campaign core.To build awareness, the campaign focused on facts about the environmental impact of the clothing industry and issued a consumer call-to-action to shop smarter (thrift shopping is one way) and donate clothes (instead of disposing of them).Edelman set out to create a live event centered around art installations that magnified the environmental issue alongside the impact that could be made by each person. The plan leveraged social channels where millennials converse and share information, to maximize the reach of campaign assets and messaging, while extending the call-to-action to their broader communities.Once they created awareness, Edelman focused on an easy-to-accomplish action that consumers could take to show they cared about clothing waste: purchase a used T-shirt instead of a new one.Oversized installations were created that portrayed clothing as giant waste spills to visually overwhelm the target audience and passersby with the monumental impact of clothing waste. In total, Edelman created three massive works of art in high-traffic landmarks in Seattle, Vancouver and Toronto, all made from reused clothing.For each installation, they generated photo and video content for paid and social media promotion that extended the life of the story told at the installations. Launching on Earth Day, Edelman evolved from inspiring awareness of the problem to giving people a way to be part of the solution.As part of the overarching Rethink Reuse campaign, Edelman executed a consumer call to action program challenging North Americans to pledge, “I Give a Shirt” about their clothing footprint and help to save over 700 million gallons of water by purchasing a used T-shirt instead of a new one.They also carried out a strong earned media push with key local media, strategic content partnerships (i.e. Upworthy, Huffington Post, Triple Pundit), and a first-of-its-kind paid media campaign with Amazon that created a mock shopping page for the ‘most sustainable shirt:’ a used T-shirt.To ensure Savers was positioned as a thought leader within the industry, Edelman also created conversations among policymakers and environmental stakeholders through activities such as hosting a Reuse Summit in Toronto and participating on a panel at the Sustainable Brands Conference. The movement was further expanded into Savers’ own stores and galvanized by its team members.Across the U.S. and Canada, Savers’ 22,000 employees helped kick off the I Give a Shirt message by creating custom T-shirts and displays in stores, and sharing their support through social channels. Their enthusiasm was so powerful that Savers decided to roll out a new employee uniform program inspired by I Give a Shirt.The Rethink Reuse campaign and installations resonated strongly with millennials: those who engaged with the campaign were 36 percent more likely to shop thrift. Beyond the powerful message of reuse on the ground, the campaign also garnered over 800,000 video views, 175,000 social engagements and 340 million overall impressions from earned media coverage. In total, more than 2 million people took part in the I Give a Shirt program and pledged to make their next new T-shirt a used one, helping save over 1 billion gallons of water — enough to fill more than 1,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.For more information, click here: https://bit.ly/2018anvils.