A Bloody Good Collab

Routine to Remarkable

With the end of the month, the routine content calendar for the coming month was being formulated. There’s always an eye out for the topical stuff for that month & July had something called WORLD CHOCOLATE DAY. We were always trying to do something fun around these. 

Plush being a period essentials brand, has always been on the lookout for the next opportunity to improve a woman experience of womanhood and her period. Keeping in mind the objective of the quarter, to amplify reach via collaborations, Chocolate Day seemed like a great place to start. We felt Paul & Mike, a popular homegrown chocolate brand was the perfect for this idea! And oh, by the way, the idea was to collaborate with P&M through Plush so that the relation of chocolates, periods & PMS would shine through. The insight was that with the onset of periods, hormones take over, and women are known to ditch their people and befriend chocolate as their partner for the next couple of days. It’s more of a fact than a mere observance.* Periods & chocolates are interrelated. Not that it’s a period pain cure, not even close but 10/10 helps you curb those cravings and get you through periods. Chocolates simply understand.

I pitched this idea to my boss & of course, it was a showstopper. Knowing Paul & Mike as a fellow Indian homegrown brand, I took no time to reach out to them. I remember having my first call with them & it being a very pleasant one. “Relevant & insightful,” said team Paul & Mike and we got down to business. We collaborated on not just a brand level but on a product level. The PoC from P&M gave us options that we could choose from in terms of the flavour. There were some really cool options like caramelized sunflower seeds, lime, kahwa tea, Himalayan pink salt, etc. Heck, I was so hyped about it, I even kept an intra-Rasta poll for the selection of the flavour. And bam, we had it: HIMALAYAN PINK SALT DARK CHOCOLATE.

Next came in the packaging phase, we were 3 women working on this project: a project manager, a savage copywriter & a bonkers designer. For us “Chocolate is comfort without words.”

How did we do then?

Starting with a number of 100 chocolate bars for our collaboration, the word got around pretty quick. Turns out every other woman and man wanted to hold our chocolate bar in their hands. During that period we also increased the online community of Plush by 500 people. We generated tons of UGC. 3 weeks down & we were already in talks to continue selling our chocolate. And yes, it’s still available online.