Le Slip Français, an 100% made in France underwear manufacturer, had a simple business objective: continue to grow outside France by exporting its business to the US. To achieve this, we invented a KickStarter story around the “French lover” universal image through Léo, a French plastic underwear mannequin, on his quest to get back with Sherry, a plastic beauty living in Los Angeles, after they met at the Paris fashion week.

The social story was based on a unique testimonial video, from Léo, looking for Internet users’ good will to help him get to California, and open a boutique to live in with Sherry: a simple metaphor for the French brand to conquer the US.

This is how Léo became a strong PR object. Everything we did was through his eyes and his “voice” on social platforms we created for him: his own Facebook page, his Instagram & Twitter accounts.

This Mannequin and its love story were the best way for Guillaume Gibault, Le Slip Français CEO and founder, to get media talking about the brand.

For French press and media, Léo was the symbol of a French dynamic and creative Start Up embodied by its CEO, and they loved to talk about that.

For US press and media, Léo allowed Guillaume Gibault, totally unknown, to get some attention.

The social timeline was simple: the day we launched the KickStarter campaign we started to try and generate as much content as we could on the story, through the online video.

The story was interactive by nature, as Léo himself was the main character, speaking on his own social pages, thanking the backers.

But not only ‘online social’, as Léo actually did his #VeryLoveTrip throughout the US to meet people and ask them to help him out. This helped generate even more digital content about our mannequin travelling in underwear throughout NY, New Orleans, Austin, Vegas, to finally L.A.

We used social media to generate conversation that could lead to the campaign going mainstream, which it did. During the 60 days of our campaign, we generated more than 20.000 likes, regrams, retweets for the #VeryLoveTrip and #LeSlipFrancais hashtags, allowing the project to be interesting enough to be spoken about on the radio and appear on prime time television, with absolutely no media buying.

Sherry on the cake: we reached our $30.000 goal ($30862) on the official KickStarter page, allowing the brand to open its pop-up store in Los Angeles! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1772149175/very-love-trip-le-slip-francais-on-the-road-to-the