Nobody lives
in a showroom
Furniture advertising has one setting: a beautiful room nobody has ever eaten in. No crumbs, no charger cables, no toddler, no dog. It sells an aspiration that leaves people feeling slightly worse about their actual living room.
Life Laid Back went the other way. Koala furniture is built for the mess of a real life, the laughs and the cries and the very weird things people do when nobody is watching. The platform gave people permission to stop performing their home and just live in it.
Role: Global Creative Director, Koala
Year: 2021
Scope: Creative idea and strategy, creative direction, look and feel, photography, campaign, photography and AI guidelines, market localisation, CRM, social and in-store templates
Credits: Bradley Firth (VP global brand strategy and creative), Kinga Papp (global brand strategy and partnerships lead), Taylor Thornton (creative director), Nikki Jones (integrated producer)
One idea,
three languages
It launched across Australia, Japan and South Korea, running out of home, press and online. One idea, three markets that share neither a language nor a sense of humour, and a very real risk of it landing beautifully in one and dying in the other two.
So I worked directly with the leads in Korea and Japan on translation, localisation and adaptation, and built the guidelines and templates underneath it. CRM, social, in-store collateral, photography direction. Enough structure that all three stayed recognisably the same brand, enough room that none of them had to ask permission to make it work at home.
Let the mess
back in
The photography had to do the arguing. Koala’s existing library was polished and primped, which is the exact thing the platform was pushing against, so I rebuilt the direction around intimacy and imperfection. Mess allowed. Signs of life required.
The framing puts you in someone else’s room rather than in front of a set. Nobody is being sold a home, they are catching somebody in the middle of enjoying theirs. Then the photography guidelines, so the same feeling survived being shot by different people in three countries.
