Typo Gets Serious About Silly Season To “Sell Mood Rather Than Sell Stuff”

Typo is proving it is ‘Serious About Silly Season’ in a series of fun, retro-feeling Christmas vignettes led by indie Hellions.

Mike Doman told LBB he and fellow Hellions partners Elle Bullen and Dan Sparkes loved playing with the juxtaposition between how seriously Typo treats the festive period, and how fun its products are.

“We were sitting around and talking about different ways we could go about it. Where we started to laugh was how seriously we were having conversations about things that were objectively silly,” he said. 

“Should we be heroing this Christmas ornament or that one? It's in the line – we are so serious about this silly season. There are real meetings happening within Typo where people are talking about fairly nonsensical things in a very serious way.”

Visually, the campaign is pared  back, featuring quirky vignettes set against red backgrounds.

“There's a simplicity of the thought that the team at Typo and Archie and Fox – who did the content and the shooting – have brought to life in a really, really lovely way,” Mike said.

“There needed to be a removal of the chaos, and a visually-arresting treatment that brought the thought to life in a way that it felt meaningful, silly, and fun and treated the season with all of the irreverence that it deserved – as well as seriousness with which we take that irreverence.”

Typo’s marketer explained the brand wanted to focus on a feeling. “In this cluttered market, there's that commercial need to sell a mood rather than sell the stuff,” Meaghan Andrews, marketing and communications manager, told LBB in an interview alongside Mike. 

“Whilst we all know that people are going to come in and love our products, we've got lots of other ways for us to sell that product … that's why we worked with Hellions, because we really wanted a concept that felt really creative, that was really disruptive. Rather than focusing on product, our product was the icing on top of the campaign, rather than the other way around.”

Entering the biggest retail period of the year, Meaghan acknowledged every brand faces pressure to cut through; “it’s really noisy out there.” “We wanted it to be disruptive content, it gets your attention, it stops the scroll, and maybe something that they hadn't seen from Typo before. Something pushing this evolution of the brand forward, but doing it in a way that we felt really still kept that DNA of that fun Typo that we know everybody really loves.”

Mike noted the competitiveness dials up the possibility of a Christmas brief. “It becomes a commercial imperative to be distinctive – looking at the codes that exist in the category and challenging them and upending them,” he said. 

​“There's no shortage of bright reds, bright greens, and candy canes. Where there is a commercial imperative to creativity is where we can have the most fun, because there's a real business need to do something slightly different and compelling.”

The Hellions team took a trip to Geelong, outside of Melbourne, to immerse themselves in the brand’s space.

“The job for us was, how do you capture the mood in the store that they built for themselves? It’s fun, interesting, colourful, vibrant and all of those sorts of things. Through the creative process, I think us going down there and having the ability to immerse ourselves into the world of Typo and the setup that they have there in Geelong is extraordinary.”

​That collaboration proved essential given the campaign’s tight turnaround. “It was very, very short,” Meaghan laughed. 

“We really had to run at it, and literally had a couple of days. To be able to work together like that, like, we've got two days and we need to throw something together [showed] we worked really well together as a team. It was awesome.”

The Typo business is “being reimagined at the moment, so we're going through a bit of a transition,” Meaghan said.

“It’s started with a new product strategy, which starts to come to life in April next year, which is really exciting.

​“At the moment, the team is working really hard on that product strategy … and what we're doing is we're looking at it from a customer perspective now, and how does the brand come to life? We know we've got Typo customers that love Typo for a reason, and we don't want to walk away from that at all. But what's the next evolution of Typo? How can we acquire new customers, but also build lots of cultural relevance in market? Because we feel like that's what's really important now.”

The campaign — a collaboration between Hellions, Archie and Fox, and Typo’s in-house team — will be rolled out across Typo stores globally from October 28th, spanning in-store, merchandising, social and digital.