Local club meets global brand
Puma x Runner Beans Club
Run Your City
Local club meets global brand to celebrate community and city running in Puma’s ‘Run Your City’ campaign with SAYSKY.
The original brief was to design a vinyl display that showcased the spirit of Runner Beans (the super friendly club for social runners who love coffee - and coincidentally my local club!) within the Puma brand world. However, I understood just how much this event meant to the community and therefore presented brand activation concepts to Puma that pushed the campaign that little bit further. Have a scroll to see…
SERVICES (DESIGNED INDEPENDENTLY)
Campaign Identity
Brand collaboration
Event & display graphics
Packaging
I created two distinctive concepts for Puma, one that took inspiration from London’s street culture with a collection of stickers that featured Runner Beans, Puma & Elsewhere (the coffee shop hosting us for the event). The other idea was to hero the coffee bean as a super graphic. The final result ended by being a combination of the two, with the super graphic beans taking over the vinyls and stickers showing up everywhere we could get our hands on!
I had total creative freedom from Elsewhere to takeover their shop windows (thanks team) which was the main touchpoint for the campaign identity. This acted as the backdrop for lots of UGC and what made the event feel incredibly special to the Runner Beans community.
Here you can also see snippets from the event captured by Ben Douglas at Fairlight Creative. He zoomed around on a Lime bike with his camera to put together a killer reel for Puma UK socials. See the full video here which hit almost 12K views.
Within the video you can see many of the touchpoints that I designed from the vinyls and t-shirts to coffee cups (myself, Joel and Lydia applied stickers to over 100 cups by hand the day before the event) and tastecards for the coffee tasting experience that Elsewhere hosted for the community after the run.
Sometimes you just can’t beat using stickers to showcase your brand, and for this event they became a cherished piece of marketing as many of the runners took sheets of them home and applied to their phone cases and laptops.
I created a set of eight custom stickers that combined the spirit of Runner Beans, Puma and Elsewhere. They also became a chance for me to flex my copywriting skills with puns like ‘Greenwich Bean Time’ and ‘Cuppa Joel’ (Joel is one of the founders of Runner Beans).
Many of the stickers have custom lettering that take on the shape of coffee beans, intended to feel fun, friendly and playful. This was really important as Runner Beans is all about bringing people together and sharing the experience of exercise in a welcoming space.
The versatility of the stickers meant we could use them to not only brand things like coffee cups and the megaphone…but also the giveaway coffee bags that Elsewhere had blended for the event. Again we arranged these by hand the day before the event, but it’s very much this human touch that helped shape the event and truly reflected the personality of the club.
Rather than design the stickers as individual items, I created them as a sheet so people could take them home as memorabilia from the event and continue to build a connection with the club as well as Puma.
After the community run, participants were invited to take part in a coffee tasting experience hosted by Elsewhere. For this and the giveaway bags of coffee, I designed a printed tastecard featuring the design language that I had created for the campaign. These were displayed in the shop acting as another part of the storytelling and handed out to runners during the event.
All of work I created for the event was expertly captured by photographers Matt Wong and Adrian Varzaru, which has helped me piece together this case study and showcase the design in all its glory.
This project was a joy to work on and I can’t thank the Runner Beans team enough for getting me involved. The whole event was an example of how well collaborations can be done when approached in the right way, by people who are passionate about their craft.
Oh and proof that stickers, simple they might be, are a powerful tool for telling brand stories. Now I’m off for a run, followed by a coffee.
CREDITS
Producers: Louis Walters, Joel Sanders & Lydia Sanders
Design: Dom Edwards (me)
Copywriting: Dom Edwards (me) & Lydia Sanders
Photography: Matt Wong, Adrian Varzaru & James Lawrence
Videography: Fairlight Creative