Everyone had a sustainability story. Ours had to stop the thumb and sell the jeans.
Everyone in the category was saying the same thing, and the people we needed to reach were internet native. So we spoke in their visual language rather than the category's.
ROLE
Creative Direction · Art Direction · Copywriting · Brand Strategy · Social-First Content Systems · Stakeholder Partnership · Production Systems Design
CLIENT
Levi’s
AGENCy
AKQA
Scope
Social · Retail · Print · Digital · E-commerce · Content system
The problem
Levi's had been making clothing sustainably for decades and had never really talked about it. By the time they were ready, the category was saturated with greenwashing and every brand was claiming to save the planet. The job was not launching a sustainable line. It was standing out in a room where everyone was saying the same thing.
What I did
Sold strategy first, to a client that wanted to skip it. I partnered directly with Levi's CMO and retail vertical heads, and my team worked embedded inside Levi's in-house creative team as a partner on the campaign rather than a go-between, agency owning social and video, in-house owning ecomm. Their instinct was to go straight to execution. Once they saw how the creative tied back to their own brand strategy they bought in completely, and it pushed the brand further outside its comfort zone than it had gone before.
Used the material innovation as the creative springboard. No eco-guilt, no corporate messaging. A visual language borrowed from digital creators and internet culture, built on the tension between synthetic and organic, analog and digital.
Built a system instead of a shoot list. Working with our content lead and creative technologists, I built a modular production approach: green screen, real-world footage, and custom 3D objects as reusable artifacts that could be layered into endless outputs. That is what let a small core team produce 300+ pieces of content from one shoot.
Impact
300+ pieces of content from a single modular system
The largest production AKQA had taken on for the account
Built on Levi's broader sustainability commitment: 4.2B+ liters of water saved and 10B recycled company-wide.
The line introduced cottonized hemp, an industry first.
Designed for the feed before anything else, in a visual language borrowed from digital creators rather than from the category. The hero film cut for YouTube, plus in-feed and story, so the same look had to carry a long watch and a scroll.
Planning the shoot as a parts list rather than a shot list. Green screen, real-world footage and custom 3D built as components that could be recombined.
Each object built once as a reusable artifact. Layering and recombining them is what let a small core team produce content at scale.
Then everywhere else. The same system had to hold on a page, at forty feet, and in a store window where it competes with everything already in front of someone.
