Challenge

Each December, we sent our clients a holiday gift.

This holiday tradition was an opportunity to say thank you for the year of partnership, while showcasing our creative chops to our client partners (and the industry more broadly) in an attention-getting way.

But in recent years, the “agency holiday greeting,” whether a card or gift, had become a highly competitive pursuit. (In fact, the leading Canadian industry publication had grown its annual article on the topic into a multi-week feature.)

It was going to be tough to make an impact. And, to add to the pressure, it would be our first holiday initiative as a truly merged Wunderman Thompson. We needed to come up with something great to mark the new era.

Inspiration

The team happened upon an interesting factoid during the discovery process. A research study had found that 72% of our best ideas actually did happen in the shower. (The science behind the stat: the relaxing and non-judgmental environment gives us a shot of creativity-enhancing dopamine, and lets our mind access our inner stream of consciousness, putting us at our ideating best.)

What many people had long felt, had been proven to be true.

So, for the holiday season, we thought, why not gift our clients something they could actually use to advantage in their work and everyday lives: a primed idea-developing pump?

Idea

We brought our insight to life with “Thoughty Wash,” a curated line of soaps designed to help our clients (literally) shower themselves with great ideas.

Every box included four handmade soaps to facilitate shower

brainstorming. Each soap was formulated to overcome a particular creative challenge; Blank Canvas helped you kick off a new project; Midnight Oil helped you power through those late nights; Blue Sky helped inspire big thinking; and Pressure Wash helped get a tough problem solved, stat.

We also created a bilingual e-commerce site to accompany our

holiday “gift-nitiative.” Inviting visitors to “shower yourself in genius”, it provided details on the four soaps and even offered helpful “thoughty-starters” – fun, marketing-driven shower ponderings that could help kick off the shower brainstorming (such as “When influencers get together, who influences whom?”)

Growth

“Thoughty Wash” cut through the holiday greeting and gift clutter with our clients.

There was strong client praise and love; as one client expressed: “A BIG thank you so much for the gift from WT – truly LOVE it! And YES some of my best ideas do happen in the shower – really like the creativity that went into the gift and it truly made me smile!” As a result, E-commerce site generated orders.

Black screen with the words Did you Know:
Yellow background. Wooden square box with a wrap around on it, saying Thoughty Wash. Blue and Yellow ornaments are beside the box.

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