Finding the creative that sells sunglasses in eight countries

In fashion you can make almost anything look good. The harder question is which picture actually moves someone to buy, and the honest answer is that nobody knows it in advance.

Vibes Shades made that harder again. The brand sells across the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and a summer in Berlin does not look like a summer in Melbourne. A creative that lands in one market can read as someone else's holiday in another.

So we stopped guessing and branched the creative into three directions: festival and lifestyle, city in motion (transit, walking, the commute at speed), and high-fashion conceptual. Each ran as its own arm, with the same offer and the same audiences underneath, so the picture was the variable.

The market answered clearly. Lifestyle carried the account: real people, real light, shot the way someone would actually photograph their own weekend. Festival imagery sits inside that family, and the conceptual and city work is still being tested. Studio-styled statics lost on every metric that mattered.

Paid was doing all the work of a brand that had no identity to fall back on, across eight countries at once. In March the account was returning well under half of what it spent, and a purchase cost roughly three times what it costs now. Every market wanted different pictures, and nothing in the account said which ones.

Live ads from the three directions, across the UK, Europe, the US and Australia.