Yarn bombing with Bulmers
As the nights draw in and the cider gardens empty, Bulmers Cider challenged us to come up with a novel way to encourage its fans to use the campaign hashtag, #livecolourful, throughout the winter months, while injecting a bit of colour into their fans’ daily routine.
We knew that 2014 had been a bumper crop for the Herefordian orchards, despite the apocalyptic weather. So to say thanks for all the cider, we decided to keep the trees warm this winter with colourful tree cosies. But here’s the best bit: if our Twitter fans tell us their favourite flavour of Bulmers, we would make them a personalised cosy with their Twitter handle on it in return.
To make this explosion of knitted colour materialise, we enlisted a professional yarn bomber to help us out. She goes by the name of Deadly Knitshade and has been quite prolific in the yarn bombing world in the last few years. If you don’t know what yarn bombing is, it’s a type of street art that uses colourful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn rather than paint or chalk. A perfect match for our Live Colourful campaign.
We set off for Broome Farm (the spiritual home of Bulmers) with a car boot full of yarn and a very eager crew of knitters. As the sun was coming up, the first requests for cosies were coming in via Twitter. As soon as we got there, our team was yarn bombing, painstakingly cutting out felt letters for the personalised cosies. Once this was done, we took a picture and sent it back to its proud owner on Twitter. The response has been really positive and people are loving their cosies.
After two full days of yarn bombing in the freezing cold, we covered enough trees to create a coloured vista of knitted goodness in the hilly orchards of Broome Farm. 1.5 million patches were stitched, 15km of tree cosies were produced and 100 lucky Twitter fans saw their names on a cosy.
Bulmers is happy with the results, seeing the reach for the first week of activity go through the roof, comparable to summer months and boosting the use of #livecolourful across Twitter and Instagram.
On top of this, it gave us the opportunity to capture some really colourful assets at the orchard, showing off both their heritage and the colourful brand image.
You can check out the pics on Bulmers’ brand spanking new website, designed and built by We Are Social – Bulmers.co.uk.