Ecover and Uncommon have been making tees from “lucky charms”, and there’s a lesson here for anyone selling behaviour change.
Are you familiar with the concept of a ‘lucky’ item of clothing? The idea is that the shirt you wore when you first met your partner, the hoodie that’s seen you through every all-nighter since art college, or the trainers you wore during a sporting triumph are things you never want to wash. Just, you know, in case it wipes out the magic.
I’ve got to be honest, it’s not something I’ve ever thought of doing, but perhaps my soul just lacks romance. Either way, according to research from the eco-friendly laundry brand Ecover, a solid 30% of Brits avoid washing ‘lucky’ clothes, and more than half (54%) believe what they wear can directly influence their luck.
This is the core of a campaign Ecover has been developing with Uncommon Creative Studio, titled ‘The Unwashables’. To that end, it’s created a limited-edition range of four T-shirts made from the “world’s oldest good luck charms”.
Storytelling device
The green shirt has four-leaf clovers pressed into the cotton, leaving a little cluster of leaf prints above the logo. The orange tee is made with rusted horseshoes.
The third is a white T-shirt dunked in sacred wishing-well water. Which looks, um, pretty much like a plain white T-shirt, thus putting your belief in luck strenuously to the test. Finally, the grey shirt is worked with fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than 4,000 years ago, which Ecover bills as “the dust of a shooting star”.
That’s not technically true: a shooting star is specifically the light created when a tiny piece of space debris burns up in the atmosphere. But to be fair, “made with ground-up ancient space rock” doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as neatly. And anyway, if we’re talking about lucky horseshoes and four-leaf clovers, it’s clear we’re not attending a science lecture.
The detail that most piqued my attention, meanwhile, is the care label. I’ve always thought this was the most overlooked piece of graphic design on any garment. And here, it’s become the main storytelling device.
Each label states in plain capitals what the shirt was made with (“This T-shirt was made with rusted horseshoes”), above a row of four icons: the shirt’s lucky symbol, a crossed-out washtub, a T-shirt wrapped in recycling arrows and a heart.
The hero photography has been well thought-out too. The four T-shirts dangle from a piece of driftwood strung up with rope, like a folk-art mobile, with a bottle of Ecover perched on the branch. It’s the one place the product appears, and it reads more like a knowing wink than a sales pitch.
What it all means
A detergent brand making clothes you can’t put in the wash seems a bit like a brewery selling pint glasses with no bottom. But it’s not just a novel way to get attention.
The campaign as a whole sits within Ecover’s laundry-care platform, which is built around a simple message: make the clothes you love last longer. And while not washing them at all might be an extreme extension of that idea to its comic extremes, the serious point beneath it is still clear and identifiable.
Above all, what makes this campaign work for me is that it doesn’t lecture or berate consumers, a trap so many environmentally focused campaigns fall into. Instead, it simply recognises an odd, yet existing habit, and uses it to make a broader point.
