Art Direction: The Poo Emoji Shirt by Betabrand

Betabrand is known for a slapstick approach to content creation and storytelling, so when it came to coming up with how to present a shirt literally covered with poop emojis, the brainstorming session consisted of all sorts of lowbrow concepts. One of them consisted of photoshopping studio photos of a model being flushed down a toilet.

Hoping for an alternative to the rampant potty humor that was present in many of our previous campaigns, in the creative meeting I pitch a concept that was almost a complete 180: let the product serve as the humorous element and do something not at all expected. Instead, I wanted to model the mood in the style of a tv novella or soap opera to create an alternative narrative that would contrast with the low brow humor of the shirt’s imagery.

It took some convincing, but the concept paid off. The best part was our media outreach took on a life of its own, as the internet took the queues provided and ran with it as major blogs picked up the story. (Julie at BuzzFeed, you get me) The launch proved successful, inspiring a number of follow-up products. Although some ‘photochop’ cheese was added to the gallery after the fact, it remains as some of the favorite work I did for Betabrand during my tenure.