Devin Anderson

CicLAvia is a nonprofit that closes off miles of street for one day in order for Angelinos to experience a community centered car-free event. The frequency has been steadily increasing from about once every 3 months to almost once a month. As the organization expands it is looking for new ideas to implement into their marketing strategy in order to attract a wider audience of attendees.

CicLAvia’s current demographic is mostly cyclists and the organization is looking for a marketing strategy to communicate to the general public that their events are pedestrian friendly, and not just for bikes.

Over fifty percent of CicLAvia’s current digital outreach is composed of cyclist-centered content with little mention of the walkable portions of the event. One of their main goals is to connect with the community and our team noticed a lack of highlighting groups and individuals at each event. In order to create a conversation with the neighborhoods they visit more of a dialogue needs to be had.

Our solution is to utilize evergreen user generated content is key to form a stronger connection with the communities that CicLAvia passes through. CicLAvia Stories consists of fixed and mobile bases where the organization collects meaningful stories from community members that highlight their individuality and express what the events mean to them. We also crafted a content creation strategy composed of challenges and prompts that allows for the organization to generate content easily that calls attention to the fun the events bring to its attendees.

MeowWolf, a collective of artists that create immersive and psychedelic art spaces. As Meowwolf began expanding to their fourth location across the US, they were looking for a way to extend the MeowWolf experience beyond the locations themselves and enlisted the help of sustainable manufacturer Macher and our team. Specifically they requested a digital product with a physical component in order to create a truly immersive experience for their customers.

MeowWolf is a fast growing immersive art exhibition that needed a new product that could extend the experience of customers beyond the visit to the space itself and serve as an introduction to the organization who might not otherwise have heard about them. Attendees of the space typically go once and may not ever have another experience with the brand ever again. MeowWolf wanted a way to incorporate artists more into whatever the solution was as a way to highlight them. An additional part of the challenge was ensuring that the solution could be sustainably manufactured using eco-friendly practices with the manufacturing company Macher.

Our team came across some extremely valuable insight during our design research that helped shape our decision making process. We discovered that the top seller in their stores were the various apparel items they carry. In addition, despite the practice Macher utilized of recycling plastic water bottles into pellets that can be extruded into threads for polyester material products, there was still concern of the microplastics associated with such products. As such, our team decided it would be best to instead go with sustainably sourced organic materials such as cotton or wool.

Our solution was Glow in the Drip, a sustainably sourced apparel line that featured glow in the dark artwork of artists from MeowWolf. The extra twist to the product was the digital component, an online scavenger hunt game, similar to PokemonGo, that challenged users to find other MeowWolf attendees outside of the venue also wearing Glow in the Drip apparel. The clothing included QR codes hidden within the artwork, linked to the online account of the purchaser, that when scanned would add points to the online account of both the wearer and the scanner. The solution extended the experience beyond the bounds of the physical venues and acted as a way to generate organic interest in MeowWolf