CHEROKEE

As part of Tesco's shift into non-food, they decided to launch the Cherokee fashion brand from the US. Moving into the world of fashion was a bold and somewhat challenging move for a company that was a grocery retailer at heart.

I have to be honest, we struggled with this brief as we really wanted to create an authentic fashion brand, which you stumbled upon at Tesco. We created some highly impactful posters for the launch, centered around the idea of relaxed clothing. 

The ads were beautiful and arresting (and they picked up a few creative awards), but the work was a little too quiet for the clients and so we took a very different approach for the follow up work.

One of the things I always loved about Tesco was that they were always very clear about what their proposition was - "the solid", as they called it. When we asked them why they wanted to launch a fashion brand, they said they wanted to offer their customers high street fashion, at about one third less than the prices charged by high street brands. That made sense to us, but building a credible fashion brand, available at the country's largest grocery retailer, and building value credentials at the same time, was not one of the easier challenges we had taken on.

In many respects, this work is a great example of "brand cross dressing" (see the article under the observations section). We borrowed the value "clothes" of grocery retailers and crashed them with the codes of aspirational American fashion brands, like Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. A beautifully simple strategy, well executed.