In the Netherlands, we throw away a lot of valuable items. For SIRE, we created a statement against this persistent throwaway culture: Waardeer het Repareer het / Value it. Repair it. A national campaign that pays homage to our modern belongings and dust off the sentiment around repairing.

Instead of focusing on reducing the waste pile (a message people hear too often), we focused on the value of products and the positive feeling that repairing gives. When you repair your shoes, you're not just fixing them, you're also repairing a bit of your self-confidence. That's why we created four repair odes for the most commonly thrown-away everyday items: Suitcases, Toys, Coffee machines and Clothing.

But creating awareness wasn't enough. And offered the target audience a concrete action perspective on repareren.nl. The website was the heart of the campaign, where the repair assistant helped everyone step by step with their repairs. Even if you have two left hands, no time, or no desire. If you can't figure it out on your own, the site will even direct you to a Repair Café or a professional repairer.

83% of the Netherlands finds the campaign relevant and rates it a solid 7.5. This resulted in 10% fewer people throwing away items right away, 9% repaired items for the first time, and 14% repaired items more often than before. But even more importantly, on peak days, we were able to help 6,000 online visitors per day with their repairs, getting many Dutch people to start repairing directly (more than 70,000 repairs after two weeks). This way, the campaign directly contributed to the pride of many Dutch people and to fewer discarded items.

I think for every creative making a SIRE campaign is one of your bucket list. And this one was a big honour!

Year
2021

Client
SIRE

Made at
DEPT®

Role
Creative Director & Art Director

With
Rob Voortman, Rene Verbong & many more

Production
Pink Rabbit
NewsLab
Pünktlich

Director
Basha de Bruijn