THE IDEA
By the beginning of 2016, coloring books had taken on a whole new meaning. Adults were turning to the repetitive motions of coloring as a form of meditation and mindfulness, and the trend was picking up speed. During the holiday season, adult coloring books were some of Amazon’s top sellers. The post-holiday wind-down was the perfect time to ump on this trend, and IKEA asked us to help them do it.

We started by creating five custom illustrations, featuring line drawings of IKEA products arranged in repetitive, mandala-style patterns for ultimate stress-relieving bliss. It was like a more relaxing version of designing your own furniture, and it left some more room for creativity, too.

#COLORWITHIKEA
We knew the best way to get people excited about the project was to leverage social media, so we debuted the designs in a post on IKEA’s Share Space blog and encouraged fans to download and print them. We created the hashtag #ColorWithIKEA and shared it on IKEA’s social media channels. To keep the momentum going, we created an animation of one of the illustrations being colored in and posted it on Vine. We kept the buzz going, and let IKEA fans do the rest.

THE RESULTS
The Internet couldn’t get enough of #ColorWithIKEA—fans on social media loved our illustrations, and the hashtag continued to grow as people shared their colored versions of the designs. The project was featured in articles on Adweek, Yahoo, Mashable, Apartment Therapy, House Beautiful, Curbed and more, which brought it in front of an even larger audience. And the positive reviews didn’t end there—our work was recognized by the Web Marketing Association when our #ColorWithIKEA entry won Outstanding Social Media Campaign at the 2016 Internet Advertising Competition Awards. We also were named a finalist in the WOW Category in the 2016 PR News Digital PR Awards.

To view the entire case study please visit: http://www.brownsteingroup.com/work/ikea/ikea-coloring-book/