The Case Movie:

Sweden’s Tourist Association celebrated their 125 year anniversary. To celebrate this and point out its legacy the superior knowledge of Sweden, we strived to find something with as rich heritage. On top of that, we wanted to show that STF is renewing themselves and are always evolving.

We found a vessel, as old as STF. With as many interpretations as Swedens different variations. Something almost forgotten yet sacred and unchanged.

We found the Swedish Folk costume.

Folkdräkt 2.0 was a competition in a collaboration with Swedens renowned fashion schools to update the Swedish folk costume, one for each province.

The 25 most promising designers got each a province assigned to them. To which they travelled to, stayed at STF’s hostels and got to experience what that province was all about. The gathered inspiration, met people and analysed the small things their province was built upon. The History, traditions and new trends became the foundation of their mission to update the folk costumes.

The contestants got each a blog where they could document the process from idea to finished costume.

The whole of Sweden could follow their journey and vote on their favourite. In the end there were 10 finalists left.

The finale was a big fashion show that were streamed live. A jury lead by Swedens fashion guru Kay Bond nominated the winner.

The reactions to Folkdräkt 2.0 were enormous. By having 25 messengers travelling around Sweden and charging each contestant with the patriotism of Swedens 25 provinces, media went wild. The Folk costume was so vibrant that the protectors of the folk costume went head to head with the people cheering for the initiative.

The result was over 14 features on SVT (public service TV broadcasting), over 12 features on TV4, countless mentions over Public Service Radio stations and even more articles in local newspapers including the front cover in a national newspaper SVD. An article about the winning contribution was commented almost 200 times and the SERP (Search engine results page) went from 3 hits to 278 000 hits.

The activity generated a PR value from 20 to 30 million SEK. And the total budget was 0.25 million SEK.

The winning costume was the contribution to Dalarna and was given to our crown princess Victoria as a wedding gift.

Foto: Daniel Cohn

See the project here

Or read the journey for each contestant.
Janna Berggren Lidia Blomgren Victoria Cleverby Åsa Copparstad Helena Garnfors Karin Granstrand Malin Henningsson Svetlana Hällsten Hanna Johansson Frostell Julia Krantz Jessica Ljung Karl Melin Elina Nilsson Kai-Åge Nordahl Åsa Norman Karin Nylinder Annie och Saga-Sofia Karoline Pettersson Anna Svensson Annika Wahlström Lina Westin Katarina Widegren Anna Zander

About a year ago I moved back from Copenhagen to my hometown Stockholm, the city that never evolves. Same restaurants, clubs, surroundings and friends. Not in a bad way, I love both Stockholm and my friends.

But what I realized was that I almost never meet my friends’ friends.
And since my friends are good people, I take for granted that my friends have the same standards as I regarding their friends. So I had an idea.

I made plans with 5 of my friends to each invite 4 of their friends to a dinner party. But the friends they invited, did not go to dinner where they were supposed to but were apportioned the others dinner parties (If you think this is hard to understand, imagine what they thought when I tried to involve them)
The dinner was set to start at 18:00 and that they should be finished by 21:00 in order to meet up with everyone at my place for the final party.

It turned out to be a great success, so great that I have done it twice more afterwards. And each time with twice as many people. So the last Switcharoo I arranged with my friend Max turned out to a total of 13 dinner parties and 61 strangers all around Stockholm that ended up partying together till early morning.

This is such a weird thing to experience, since you dine with people you have never met yet has some untold relationship with. It all starts out as a blind-date but soon turns into a perfect mix of interesting new relations as well as old ones.

As I get all of the names that will be attending I try as hard as possible to make sure that no one knows each other before. And this was the end result from the previous Switcharoo.

As everyone finally lets go of their anxiety from the dinner party it is time to go the final party, and this is where the magic happens. Even though we are Swedes and famous for being shy and withdrawn, everyone seems so relaxed in engaging other people as if they knew them before and has great time together. It is of course fun hearing from ones original friends how their dinner turned out, but just as fun asking other people the very same question. Since they have been through the same thing.

I believe one of the keystones of this concept is the you leave your comfort zone in the protection of your friends friends. And when you feel relaxed with this you are more open-minded and comfortable engaging new people with a topic that is exclusive but relevant.

Every time I find an image that for whatever reason inspires me, I keep it.
And some time ago I re-found this one.

The idea was just so fantastic and unselfish.
Two guys is for no obvious reason giving away free advice.

So I made plans with a friend and went to a shopping mall in order to try it here in Sweden. The circumstances were not so good. For starters being in Sweden, the land of the shy and reductive. And it was a rainy Saturday morning as well.

But, it turned out great!
It was quite slow in the beginning, people saw the sign, smiled and passed, but after a while people started asking us for our advice.
And the questions were far from what we expected. Besides the most common questions, why and which brand we are working for, we gave advice in how to recognize gold, selecting a horse to buy or how to give away more flyer’s and finding good men.

The most interesting part was the everyone that came up to us was wondering who we worked for, and why are we doing this.
I guess that people are not expecting something for free, and we didn’t either. Every time I do things like this, great things comes out of it. I learn, think and get inspired.

In retrospect the best part was watching the few milli-seconds people spent before getting the courage to ask for our advice. The hesitation and nervosity, the indecisiveness, which disappeared when the found out the we actually tried to give genuine good advice. The only thing I am not sure of whether we gave good advice or not.
But we gave it try.

EDIT: A friend in New York stumbled upon the very same idea. It is most likely not because of this post, but I like it anyhow.

This is a Campaign for Svenska Turistföreningen (Sweden’s Tourist Association).

SVENSK VERSION

Background
STF is Sweden’s Tourist Association handling hostel and alpine chalets all over Sweden. The members of STF is an aging group and few young people know much about them. Our challenge was to change the apparence of STF and attract younger people to become members of STF.

Strategy
Make Swedes wanting to re-discover our country by displaying it in a new interesting way.
We wanted to create a modern version of a classic tale by Selma Lagerlöf “The wonderful adventures of Nils“. A tale about a boy flying on a goose across all the historical provinces of Sweden.
But we did it as a job – Sweden’s most Swedish Job.

We divided the campaign into 2 phases:
1. Casting
2. The Adventure

1. The first phase was to find the person who where to travel all over Sweden. We needed someone that knew how to handle the social medias and made the application through youtube and twitter. In this phase we choose to tap into the conversation of another successful campaign, The Best Job in the World. This exploded as a hot topic in the media all over Sweden.

Finally we found Calle.

2. During the final phase which were the actual campaign we sent of Calle to travel around Sweden for 60 days. On his side he had the photographer Filip who documented the entire trip.
We created a blog where everything was documented using blog posts, videos, tweets, GPS-coordinates, game-shows, hostels and live-streams.

The Results
The campaign became a huge success.
Over 70% more traffic to STF’s website.
167 000 unique visitors per month
PR value over 7 300 000 SEK for just offline channels (TV, Radio, Newspapers)
Online sales went up with 50%

Syrup:
Account manager: Johan Sjöberg
Art Director: Henrik Frenne
Art Director: Thea Hamrén
Creative Director: Fredrik Lundgren
Copywriter: Walter Naeslund
Producer: Marlene Hernbrand
Programmer: Joel Larsson

http://www.yourstrulyclothes.com

I have been recently looking into different solutions for easy e-commerce implementations for the average joe.

There are several customizable products that all seem to do the job. But everything is still somewhat too difficult. I want a super-simple solution. Much easier than the widgets or pre-made themes that exist. It should be just as easy as adding a caption to a picture in any chosen environment.

Because there are many people wanting to do their own thing, selling their niche products and services such as hand-made ashtrays, cool tshirts and dog collars. Many more than there are people knowing how to implement the solution. And there is a market for it on the Internet. A big market.

If you could get just a tiny fragment of a percent all these ultra-niched product transactions, then we would be talking big money.
The perfect partner would probably be amazon or e-bay since they are an existing trust-worthy actor and also because they are lacking a proper customizable interface.

Many people want to brand the environment they sell their products and not depend on mega-huge companies but they still get the advantage of an existing platform that is always refining its usability.

What I would like to work with is an external account, and upon registration I get my unique ID. And by adding a URL+ID+Pricing tag it would automatically apply a roll-over function or a simple field connected to the productimage/productvideo where I can add it to a cart and buy it from.

This service could also act as an escrow partner to guarantee safety and serious transactions.

That would be awesome!