we are animals

S’well is the world’s most fashionable reusable water bottle. Chaco was hired to help them grow: from beautiful product into formidable brand.

OBJECTIVE raise awareness of S’well in the face of growing competition from copycats.

CHALLENGE client needed a film on air in less than two months, but having no brand strategy, didn’t know what it should say, how to say it nor whom to say it to.

SOLUTION first, we dissected S’well’s history to understand the basic drivers behind the brand’s expansion from zero to a 20,000 stores presence in just 5 years. From this exercise we identified Desire as the crucial growth-fueling emotion and enshrined it in the Brand DNA. We then studied the semiotics of this emotion: how Desire is elicited and perpetuated in personal relationships as well as between brands -especially luxury brands- and people.

This is how Magic became the strategic direction, giving birth to a body of work including the film below.

But great content needs great distribution: so Chaco planned, negotiated and purchased the media on behalf of S’well, running the film on Popsugar.com and supporting it with native, branded content throughout the publication.

RESULTS awareness grew by over 1,000% (source: Nielsen’s Vizu), Completion and Click Through Rates over 50% above benchmarks (source: Google’s DCP), achieved over 10M impressions (source: Popsugar.com). If strategy without execution is just a dream, execution without strategy can only be a nightmare.

Small firms can find it hard to match the energy, world class talent and diversity that make larger companies so competitive. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Start a business with less than 10 employees and you’ll soon discover how quickly your co-workers can seem dull. No matter how much you like them, walking into a small office with just the 6 of you feels as eerily quiet as church on a Tuesday morning.

Smallness can eventually work against you, as talent migrates out to rival firms with a mailroom bigger than your entire office and opportunities pass you by because you lack the scale and diversity needed to solve complex problems.

Realizing that we were not the only consultancy facing this challenge, we launched Kongo: our opportunity to surround ourselves with some of the brightest independent professionals and start-ups in the media and creative industries.

We opened over 5,000 square feet of beautifully designed loft-space to a small group of world-class designers, researchers, writers, producers, motion graphics experts, innovators and foreign correspondents. Some of our colleagues include FireFish USA (research), Positron (experiential design engineers), A Different Engine (UX design), Messaging Lab (biotech), QuesttoNo (product design), SmartAssDesign and Machine (innovation and design)

Based in Dumbo, the heart of New York’s most vibrant start-up community, we now collectively enjoy the resources of larger Madison Avenue agencies, with none of the politics.