After Lean Cuisine and Fred Segal committed to joining forces at Sundance, the two companies began to discuss other ways to team up at the festival to promote their brands.
Because Sundance is set on the ski slopes, Lean Cuisine Marketing Director Brett White, his team and Fred Segal devised the concept of giving to Sundance VIPs a scarf that would tie back to both brands.
Fred Segal designer Joey Tierney created a scarf that included a sheaf of wheat in the design, symbolizing Spa Cuisine’s use of whole grains, and that contained a concealed pocket for carrying personal items. The scarves would be available for purchase by festival-goers and presented in VIP gift bags to keep celebrities warm and the Spa Cuisine-Fred Segal brands visible throughout the festival.
Then the Dec. 26 tsunami hit Indonesia and 11 other countries, leaving 230,000 dead or missing and more than 400,000 homeless.
“We said, ‘Hey, why don’t we donate the proceeds (from the sale of the scarves) to the (United Nations World Food Program for the) tsunami relief effort?'” White says. ” … It all kind of came together. … We had planned the scarf thing definitely. (When we decided to turn the scarf sales into a fund-raiser), it happened very fast and it was a very tight timeline to get it done.”
White didn’t yet have numbers from the proceeds of the Sundance scarf sale but said the product would also be available for purchase for a limited time at Fred Segal Beauty in Santa Monica, Calif., as well as online at the Fred Segal Web site.
