Canadian Apparel
The timely hi-jacking of an iconic brand/store
Canadian Apparel was a three-day pop-up shop hosted in a hi-jacked American Apparel store, all in an effort to promote a Canadian-made streetwear brand. To amplify the idea and further highlight the rarity of locally made products, the hosting brand invited 9 other Canadian-made clothing companies to join the pop-up in what would feel more like a movement and less like a shop.
ONEMETH Goods is a Canadian made brand that was looking to elevate sales and awareness. When American Apparel announced their bankruptcy we developed a way to leverage their brand (and abandoned store) to introduce a whole new audience to the streetwear brand. And to do that we developed Canadian Apparel, a three-day pop-up in a freshly shut American Apparel space.
We completely hijacked the store, re-imagining every aspect of it from the signage to shopping bags, and then we popped-up. We invited 9 other brands that exclusively manufacture goods in Canada, fostering the small but dedicated collection of like-minded brands. We also developed social media marketing materials for Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. And finally, we opened the doors to the media, the design community, and the people. Response wise, anyone walking by the store ended stopping and looking at the revamped space, with a startling number actually disrupting their plans and entering the store. In addition, people online and IRL continually discussed the importance of Canadian made brands. And finally we received an outpouring of requests to make Canadian Apparel a permanent retail space.
In terms of numbers, this three-day pop-up saw 1 customer enter the store every 34 seconds. 1 product was sold every 17 minutes, outpacing general benchmarks. This all resulted in the brand’s best weekend of sales ever and a 400% spike in website traffic and the strongest week of sales in the past year. Outside of sales, the event was covered by international fashion authorities, national news channels, local culture publications, plus a long list of bloggers, vloggers and other influencers bringing over 9,000,000 earned media impressions and over 1,000,000 earned social media views.
