Victorinox

Digital & social marketing / retail / experiential
Victorinox is a global luxury Swiss brand, famous for making the original Swiss Army Knife, with a strong international following of loyal fans and a luxury product range extending to kitchen knives, Swiss watches, apparel, luggage and fragrances. 

During my 5 years as lead copywriter of a small creative agency team on this account, our remit was to help increase brand relevance and communicate Victorinox's core values to the UK audience. We looked after social media strategy and content idea generation, creating some well-liked and shared films, how-to guides and campaigns. 

A Tale of Swiss Inventiveness
The first work example here is a piece of content called A Tale of Swiss Inventiveness. The brief was to showcase the brand's sustainability credentials, and we weaved in the story of the company with sweet star turns from actual employees – with a nod to the production design aesthetic of Wes Anderson.

Victorinox x Rob Ryan
The below examples are from our global interactive online and in-store campaign for Victorinox with renowned British artist, Rob Ryan. The partnership was to promote Victorinox Tomo – the brand’s first ever reinterpretation of its classic Swiss Army Knife.

The Victorinox Tomo, (the Japanese term for friend or companion), strikes a balance between Japanese design and Swiss precision – skilfully brought to life by Tokyo design house, Abitax.

With Rob Ryan we launched the ‘Modern Art Cutting’ campaign – a take on ‘Kirigami’, the ancient and intricate Japanese art of paper cutting. We commissioned Rob to create a unique modern art cutting for Victorinox Tomo, to form the main creative assets for the campaign. His piece of work features a ‘tree of life’ depicting how the Swiss army knife is shared and passed down from generation to generation, always ready and waiting in your pocket to help. The backdrop of the piece draws on the beauty of Swiss forests, inspired by Ryan’s trip to Ibach, Switzerland.

My colleagues at pd3 designed the window display and visual merchandising for key stores in the UK, US and Europe, as well as creating the global Victorinox Tomo website, featuring three downloadable modern art cutting stencils created by Rob Ryan, an interview with him in his studio about his work, and three modern art cutting master class videos, all exclusive to Victorinox. The campaign also included a media partnership with Creative Review, and an in-store launch event on the 13th October.

To engage creative audiences across the UK, Europe and US through social media, we created the #alphabunting generator. This was a unique paper cut artwork generator, which turned tweets and facebook messages into individual artworks using a bespoke alphabet, also created by Rob Ryan. You could tweet at #alphabunting to have your tweet automatically turned into a modern art cutting that was tweeted back to you from Victorinox Tomo. You could also have a go on the ‘create your own’ page of the website.

By partnering with Rob Ryan we introduced the Victorinox Tomo to a global creative audience that maybe wouldn’t have been exposed to the brand before. The buy-in to the campaign from multiple territories was testament to the beautiful assets that Rob worked with us to create.  

The Makers series - Kyle Bean
For The Makers series for Victorinox, we featured fashion designers, artists and architects. We commissioned Kyle to create a Swiss landscape-inspired diorama, hold a workshop at the Victorinox London flagship store, and create a paper cut download for budding paper artists to have a go themselves.