Andrew
Cresswell

Stone Island Material Research

Stone Island has a research archive most people never see: the prototypes, the reactive dyes, the fabrics that didn't make it to production. Nobody had put it in a store.

I came up with the idea and had to sell it twice. First to our own buying team, who had to be convinced that an exhibit of unsellable garments was worth floor space, and then to Stone Island, who had never let a retailer touch the archive. I ran it from there with the brand, our PR team and our events team.

The first exhibit of its kind at a retailer anywhere. Covered by Hypebeast. Stone Island now uses it as their example of what a retail partner should do.

What Do You Wear?

A video franchise built on a simple question put to athletes who get asked about everything except how they dress. Raptors, Maple Leafs, Blue Jays, an Olympic gold medallist. Gary Trent Jr., Penny Oleksiak, Scottie Barnes, Mitch Marner, RJ Barrett, George Springer, Max Domi, Nazem Kadri.

Holt Renfrew was not making video when I arrived. This is the thing that proved it could, and then kept going for three seasons and four years, which is the harder part.

Over 5 million cumulative views across the franchise. The brand's social is now almost entirely video, built by the team I hired for it.

Holt Renfrew Magazine

The magazine had been dormant. Bringing it back meant deciding what it was for, and I argued it shouldn't be a catalogue with better paper. So the issues carry travel guides, recipes from Mon Lapin and Anh & Chi, a conversation between two chefs about how a room should feel, and an archivist talking about garment dyeing.

Product is in there. It just isn't the reason to pick it up.

Renaissance Flagship

Beyoncé's Renaissance tour came through with a Balmain couture collection and Holt Renfrew's flagship became the place to see it. Lines down the block every day it was open.

My team ran content: on site capturing, the social plan, and the influencer coordination around it. The scale of the earned coverage belonged to the artist. What we controlled was whether the brand showed up in it looking like it belonged there.

The single largest event in Holt Renfrew's history. Roughly a million impressions on owned social, with substantial earned coverage on top.

Lin’s Lucky Red Envelope

Lunar New Year retail usually means red packaging and a zodiac animal. We made a story instead, and it landed with the community it was actually for rather than with people watching that community from outside.

Silver for Best Use of Content at the 2022 Media Innovation Awards, and named one of the world's ten best sustainability and CSR campaigns by the IGDS at their 2022 summit.

Black History Month series

Five years, five programs, no repeats. A poet, a chef and a sommelier, a painter, a producer digging through records, and a hockey player rewriting who the rink belongs to.

Running a cultural program once is a campaign. Running it five years straight, through changes of budget and leadership, is a franchise, and it's the part I'd point at.

Pride series

Partnered with those already doing the work rather than simply talking about them. New Ho Queen for organizing queer Asian nightlife. Lotion Mag for a fresh view on a Gen Z inclusive utopia. FUNCTION for a ballroom house.

The Lotion partnership carried past the campaign: when they launched their print magazine it ran our content, and they asked me onto the panel at the launch.

Seasonal brand campaigns

Seasonal campaigns are where a luxury retailer usually books models and a location. I pushed to cast from the city instead: musicians, restaurateurs, an NBA general manager, DJs who actually play in the rooms we were shooting.

For All Day All Night we threw a real party in Montreal and filmed it. It was a party first and a campaign second, which is the only reason it worked.

Commercial content franchises

The commercial calendar still has to get served. These are the formats I built so that product content had a human in it, rather than arriving from a faceless corporation with a discount attached.

The same thinking went into rebuilding the holiday gift guides, which are the most commercial thing a retailer publishes all year.

The rebuilt gift guides drove a 60% increase in sales, and grew again in the years after. An expanded influencer program lifted engagement and reach 60% year over year.

Tweed ‘Hi’

Canada legalized cannabis and nobody had done this before. There was no category playbook, no benchmark, and advertising rules that ruled out most of what you'd normally do.

I ran digital planning on the launch and then built the portfolio-wide content strategy for Canopy Growth behind it, including co-branded series with Vice and Complex and a documentary screening series with Tokyo Smoke and Hot Docs.

Tweed came out of legalization with the highest national brand awareness in the category.