Case Study: Elevating a Brand to Lifestyle Influencers with Filson
Challenge: Filson, a classic outdoors brand, has been become popular with the fashion and lifestyle communities, but largely through their classic field cloth bags. The brand needed to subtly take control of this community and utilize the brand equity to introduce new products while maintain authenticity within the core, endemic market.
Goal: Elevate and introduce new Filson products to the influential fashion and lifestyle community supporting key product segments: travel, home, pet, fashion/lifestyle and the core endemic audience.
Tactics: While at Turner PR, I led Filson’s first product seeding to online influencers across the above silos as well as to key endemic supporters to secure their commitment to the brand even as expansion took place in new markets. Capitalizing on the holiday season, and with a brand awareness mission more so than impressions, I created a strategy to seed personalized product selections as a holiday gift with no expectation of blog or social coverage. Products (vests, blankets, bags and dog beds depending on recipient) were handwrapped with personalized handwritten notes and extensive tracking and monitoring by the Turner PR team.
Results: Though not required or requested, there were over 500K third party blog impressions and over 320K third party Twitter impressions from 30 recipients. Additionally, fashion blogger WhatIWore was the 14th highest traffic driver in the crucial holiday sales period. The relationships with these influencers became stronger throughout the following year with Filson being able to utilize their feedback in product development, guest blogging and event attendance, a win in elevating the brand beyond fly fishing and bird hunting communities.