Rather than lecturing teens about how bad fast fashion was for the environment, we showed them, by using tons of cast-off clothing to construct a massive art installation that mimicked the disastrous effects of an oil spill.

By invading a series of pristine natural landscapes with massive mounds of recycled clothing, we revealed to our teen audience the normally hidden cost of textile waste.

We chose to launch on Earth Day, leveraging the most environmentally relevant moment of the year to earn maximum attention. Once teens were exposed to this awful truth, we gave them a means to take action by replacing just one new t-shirt purchase with a used one. And we gave them a memorable rallying cry to share on social platforms: #igiveashirt.

To take full advantage of the placement on pristine landscapes, we decided to harness the visual menace of an oil spill—hoisting three blackened drums more than 5 meters high on a frame to support more than three tons of clothing that would spill in a cone-shaped spiral.

Dotting the landscape surrounding the towers were barrels emblazoned with informative messaging about clothing pollution. In later installations, we supplemented the build with street teams handing out reused t-shirts stenciled with our branding. A pyramid of barrels branded with campaign messaging represented the water used in creating a single new t-shirt.

The entire design, build and earned media was captured in a content series shared via owned social channels.

The campaign proved to be a massive success by driving the largest-ever visibility for the Savers/Value Village brand.

• 340 million impressions through a combination of earned, social and paid media

• More than 2 million used t-shirts sold in a single month

• Saved 5.5 billion liters of fresh water used in t-shirt production

• Saved millions of pounds of reusable clothing from landfill

• Drove new corporate initiative to save 1 billion pounds of reusable clothing in 2017

• Launched first-of-its-kind social messaging advertising on Amazon advertising platform

• Brand overhaul included new messaging in uniforms for more than 22,000 store employees

The effort also completely repositioned the client brand from a quirky, low-cost provider of second-hand clothing to a leader in purposeful reuse and a powerful, impactful, practical advocate for the environment.