Jeni’s × GOLF le FLEUR* | Snowflake
It’s Tyler, The Creator’s world and we’re just living in it—whether you’ve realized it yet or not.
From music and fashion to carnivals and cartoons, Tyler’s work cuts across culture in a carefully calibrated way, each project feeding the next, the sum of the activity greater than the individual parts, and the point of view always firmly rooted in the celebration of creativity, self-expression, and inclusion.
We love Tyler’s wildly inventive and idiosyncratic mind—literally nobody else could have made a record like IGOR—but even more so we love his message and example for how you can create your own world, too:
Love yourself and be yourself, no matter what others think; believe in yourself and trust your ideas; be curious—try things, explore, ask questions; surround yourself with people who dream and want the best for themselves (and for you); develop a clear vision for what you want; do the thing you want to do; keep doing it and be smart about it; and you’ll become the person you want to be.
Idea, execute, repeat.
Ice cream and music have always felt like the same thing to us at Jeni’s—flavor is scent, and like music, we play with notes and each combination makes people feel a different way—so when Tyler reached out in 2018 saying he was a fan of our ice creams, we thought why not make a flavor together?
Snowflake was inspired by a shared love of color, scent, and flavor, and by the idea of how what you perceive can be shifted by expectations—and how color plays a role. The two-colored ice cream was a study of mint: cool peppermint on the ivory side, warm spearmint on the green side, with buttery white chocolate melted throughout, white chocolate flakes for some crunch, and a little sea salt to bring the flavor and scent forward. Cool and warm. Ivory and green. Snowflakes in summer.
Results
Sometimes the best way to launch a campaign isn’t what you planned: a leak.
Long before our joint announcement of the collab, an image of some print collateral for Snowflake surfaced on IG with the #tylerthecreator hashtag (vendor leak?), and the post was picked up by the then influential but now deleted @golfwangreporters account, breaking the news to the very active Tyler fan community online.
The heat was palpable and it was early proof of concept. Between Tyler’s promotion of the ice cream, earned media from outlets that hadn’t written about us before, and shared media from fans who posted about everything he did, we knew that collaborating with Tyler was going to help us reach new audiences and increase brand awareness in a meaningful way.
Tyler’s main-feed IG post announcing the collab had over 942K+ engagements… with him answering questions in the comments about how we ship ice cream. Our IG announcement was our highest engaged post ever at the time—and 55% of the people it reached weren’t following us.
Traffic to our website that day was the highest it’d been since the day we announced our nationwide recall in 2015.
On launch day online, that traffic number tripled—with 92% of the people being new visitors—and we had our biggest online sales day ever.
On launch day in the shops, comp shop sales were up 28% over the previous year, and most of our shops across the country had lines at open—on a Monday. Snowflake made up a significant portion of our business in shops its first week, outperforming the next highest performing flavor in pints by 2.5x.
For launch day in LA—synced up with the release of GOLF’s summer collection—Tyler’s team transformed the parking lot of his GOLF flagship store to create an experience around our ice cream truck, and Snowflake was available to the hundreds of people lined up outside, down the block, and across the street five hours before the store opened.
Between earned and shared media, in less than two weeks the campaign delivered outsized results with 442M+ impressions, rapturous reception online, and the collab was seen universally as surprising and unexpected and—most important—wanted:
Literally the GREATEST COLLAB IN THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING.
“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT I NEEDED THIS COLLAB BUT NOW IT’S THE ONLY THING I NEED.”
“Tyler has peaked. No other collaboration will ever be as good as this one.”
More than 1,000 pieces of content (we stopped counting at 1k) were shared across social media—from memes and fan art on Instagram and Twitter to Reddit posts and unboxing videos on YouTube.
We held Snowflake inventory back for a restock when Tyler’s IGOR tour came through Columbus a couple months after the launch—taking advantage of the opportunity to spend time together in our test kitchen working on his next flavor—and for his Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in LA, where we served ice cream out of a gigantic Snowflake pint, the announcement of which included a Postmates tie-in to further extend reach with free delivery of Snowflake pints in LA.
Role / Responsibilities
Project lead, brand partnership, strategic relationship management, campaign strategy, communications strategy, connection planning
Creative courtesy of the Jeni’s Art + Design Team.
