Retailers have traditionally turned to various platforms for marketing—social media, billboards, magazines, commercials. Allbirds turned to…Stanley Tucci.
Cards on The Table, a four-part series created in collaboration with Tucci and currently streaming on YouTube and Allbirds’s website, explores “new connections” forged through a “dream dinner party” featuring guests delving into their dreams, beliefs, and personal stories, according to a company release.
While Tucci leading the lively chats should be enough of a motivator (at least for us!), Allbirds also had help from Dr. Orna Guralnik, a clinical psychologist known for her role in Showtime’s Couple’s Therapy who “curated decks of discussion cards that are tailored to each episode’s guests,” including actor Sophie Turner, Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr., and television host Tan France, the company said.
The retailer positions the series as a unique way to market its sustainability efforts and its Allbirds By Nature platform.
“We knew it was really going to be a critical year for Allbirds, and we had to find a way to reignite the brand,” Kelly Olmstead, CMO of Allbirds, told Retail Brew. “We knew that wasn’t going to be done through the traditional methods of kind of buying eyeballs and putting forward a message that only came from our point of view. We knew that we needed to get back to not only being a part of culture, but driving culture in a way that was meaningful to our consumers.”
In July, the retailer struck up a meeting with multimedia production company OBB. Olmstead said that while the brand did not have a clear picture of what exactly the series would look like, things fell into place pretty quickly.
“I can’t remember exactly if we came to the table with a dinner party idea or how that worked, but I know for certain we had that in our mind’s eye, just because it is something that is in the fabric of our consumers’ lives: somebody who’s post college, not necessarily out bar hopping, but really does like to connect and have deeper conversation over things that are meaningful to them,” she said.
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While the dinner party concept became the one that stuck, the series still lacked a distinct voice to lead it. Tucci, according to both Olmstead and Elias Tanner, SVP of growth at OBB, was the natural choice for the project.
“[Tucci] came in and knew how to amplify everything that we had already set up,” Tanner told Retail Brew. “The great reason why the dinner party was the setting and the ideal version of that is, you have laughs, but you also have, hopefully, the settings in which people share things that maybe they don’t normally share, and you get into some deeper conversations than you maybe have expected to.”
Olmstead said Tucci embodied a sense of “curiosity, taste, [and] consideration” which ultimately was an “articulation” of what the retailer considers its customer.
As Allbirds brainstorms its marketing initiatives for the future, it believes it will continue to approach brand promotion in a distinct manner with the potential continuation or replication of Cards on the Table.
“Part of the strength and importance of this kind of storytelling is that it’s continuous, that it’s in your life, that it’s something that you know connects to the consumers and the audience in a real way that isn’t just ‘We love making great commercials,’” Tanner said.