No one wants to live in a world where children need to hide from violence, so to grab attention we created a social experiment that offered hiding as an answer. We designed a children’s bunkbed with a disturbing secret hatch for kids to escape abuse and called it hiding furniture. The idea was to shock people with a solution that doesn’t try to prevent child abuse, but accepts it as normal.

We designed and built our hiding furniture before partnering with a children’s furniture store to display the piece. We then installed hidden cameras around the store and hired an actress to play our salesperson. When the store opened, she pushed the furniture on unsuspecting parents and explained it’s secret hiding place and the dark reasoning behind it. We captured parent’s raw emotions and reactions to the disturbing bed and created a video of the social experiment.

The resulting video was one of our client’s most successful with over 8 million views. On Facebook alone, it reached 6,657,874 people, received 2.1 million views and had 38,715 reactions, comments and shares. More importantly, it sparked a deep discussion online among the audience with many sharing their personal stories of abuse and violent discipline in the comments. Our client’s microsite, which featured the video, saw a 2,500% increase in traffic. There were 161,248 unique page views with an average time on the page of 3:02 mins which is 56.8% higher than the global website average. We not only helped raise awareness, but we motivated people to learn more and start discussions. These are the first steps toward making sure no child has to hide.