Campaign of the Week: Rare Stripes, Tiger Beer /

Both Tiger Beer and luxury fashion house Kenzo have a connection to tigers. Tiger Beer’s is obvious, its name and logo, and Kenzo introduced a tiger icon to its clothing seven years ago. So, it makes sense that both brands are concerned that there are as few as 3,900 tigers left in the wild.
 

During an interview for our Tiger Beer brand spotlight, the brand’s global director Mie-Leng Wong told Contagious that Tiger Beer had formed a six-year relationship with the World Wildlife Fund in order to grow the population of wild tigers. ‘It’s completely unique,’ she said, ‘the WWF has never collaborated with an alcohol brand before.’

As a part of this wider initiative, Tiger Beer, with the support of Kenzo, has developed a capsule collection inspired by tigers in the wild. All the proceeds from the eight limited-edition items will be given to the WWF in support of doubling the tiger population.

The Rare Stripes collection was designed by four emerging artists and is being sold under the Kenzo brand.

All four of the artists, from Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia and the US, were flown out to Cambodia to visit a tiger wildlife conservation site and hear from Phurba Lendhup, a WWF wildlife specialist.

Lendhup explained that tigers are a target for poachers and showed the artists confiscated snares. The artists were also told the stories of individual tigers, which they used as inspiration for their designs.

This whole process was carefully documented and turned into a five-minute promotional film by Marcel Sydney, Tiger Beer’s ad agency.

Each artist created their design based on a real tiger and its story. American artist and sculptor Meryl Smith, for example, was inspired by Nameless, a tiger that was found alive, with his paw caught in a snare trap, but died shortly after. Her watercolour painting, which was printed onto T-shirts, depicted a tiger with long, doe-like legs intertwined with a wire.

The capsule collection dropped on 21 July in Tokyo, and items will be available to buy in select Kenzo stores at the beginning of August.

Every piece of apparel had the tiger that inspired its design’s stripes stitched into the fabric (tiger’s stripes are like human fingerprints, in that no two patterns are the same). A QR code was also integrated into the label, so customers could scan the item to learn more about the story of the tiger behind it.