While it’s illegal in Canada to pay women less than men, the gender pay gap still exists in every part of the country. On average, women make 75 cents for every dollar a man makes. Despite the indisputable facts, Canadians were no longer engaging in the dialogue necessary to enact change. The Canadian Women’s Foundation, Canada’s leading voice for gender equality, wanted to find a way to reignite the conversation about the gender pay gap with original and new creative work.

The spotlight had dimmed on Canada’s gender pay gap, but the internet was lighting up over another topic: Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company GOOP had just launched a $75 This Smells Like My Vagina candle. We took this opportunity to steer the conversation towards the gender pay gap by creating a This Smells Like My Penis candle with a $100 price tag. With no difference in functionality between the two candles, the price difference highlights the disparity between men and women’s pay in Canada. In short, we made a ridiculous candle to call attention an even more ridiculous issue – the longstanding and ongoing pay inequality in Canada.

The Canadian Women’s Foundation was looking to spark a discussion on Canada’s gender pay gap. With no media budget, we studied what Canadians were talking about – searching for a way to leverage existing media buzz for our own campaign. We monitored the press cycle and saw an opening in the viral coverage of Gwyneth Paltrow’s $75 This Smells Like My Vagina candle. We forged our way into the existing dialogue with a counterpart This Smells Like My Penis candle, priced at $100 to reflect the difference in women and men’s pay. With three key photo assets of the candle (the front, the back, and a Vagina candle side-by-side), we launched on Instagram and shared the post with journalists, influencers and broadcasters who had expressed an interest in the GOOP candle. This pivoted Canada’s focus to something even more absurd than a genital-themed candle: the persisting gender pay gap.

The news of Gwyneth Paltrow’s $75 This Smells Like My Vagina candle hit every media outlet mid-January. Within three days, we’d created the Smells Like Inequality campaign. We launched on Instagram with a single post featuring the front and back of the candle. The post drove to a shoppable site to purchase the candle and learn more about Canada’s gender pay gap and the work the Canadian Women’s Foundation is doing to close it.

We made a simple candle to shine a light on a complex issue – one that had all but faded into the background of Canadian discourse. On a $2000 production budget and $0 media spend, the candle’s message was heard nationwide and further. The Smells Like Inequality campaign garnered over 400 million earned media impressions and was covered in publications ranging from Business Insider to Buzzfeed, Men’s Health to Elle, The New York Post to Vice. Even Gwyneth Paltrow and Elise Loehnen (CCO of GOOP) gave it a shoutout on Jimmy Kimmel and Good Morning Britain, respectively. It inspired an international conversation about gender pay inequality, reaching from Germany to Nigeria, Mexico to South Africa, and all across the globe.