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Bring Opt Outside beyond Black Friday and into the everyday.  

Context & Challenge

In 2015, REI did something unthinkable in the retail space on one of the busiest shopping days of its year: closing its doors and giving employees (paid) time off to enjoy the outdoors. In doing so, this iconic brand action in retail has inspired millions of people to get outside (famously tagged with #optoutside), with countless organizations following suit.

But, in the past 10 years, Black Friday and its surrounding culture has shifted from what it once was: a one day, largely IRL experience to a full month of a pre-Black Friday sales, on top of Black Friday sales, and rounded out last call sales across our inboxes, feeds, and storefronts. .

Cultural Insight

Somewhere between the immediacy of everything at our finger tips within consumerist culture and the urgency of all our things that we need to do in our actual lives is the pandemic-fuelled dissonance of what’s real (measurable) time versus perceived time. For many people, it’s safe to say our relationship with time doesn’t really feel like ours.

(And chances are, you might have multiple devices, screens, and things on your mind as you’re reading this paragraph.)

Strategic Approach

We set out to culturally reclaim what it means to opt outside by re-imagining the connection of time to ourselves, our values, the outdoors, so we can limitlessly reap the mental, physical, and communal benefits of time outside. In other words, less autopilot and more time outside.

Creative Solution

We launched a fully integrated campaign that calls time out on autopilot and invites our employees and 24+ million members to reset their routines, as brought to life through a national day of free classes and tours, three (3) films that are soundtracked to Dr. Dog’s Where’d the time go?, and everyday  time-bound invitations to opt outside with us.

The visual language of this campaign leverages the UI of technology that governs our relationship with time in the day-to-day, and subverts it around acts of being outside.