Feel At Home.

Home. I’m sitting in mine now as I write this. What is home these days? The place that stores all our belongings? Where we go for refuge at the end of a long day? The stage upon which family memories are made? Yes to all of those, for me at least. And for a decent chunk of 2020 & 2021, a place we often weren’t allowed to leave. For many, home became work & vice-versa, the delineation between the two becoming blurred. So it was something of a revelation when, during those locked down months, I found myself working with a business that’s named after someone’s home. Dunelm. There I was enjoying a piece of film where the founder of the business, Bill Adderley was explaining how he’d used the name of the family home on an invoice with a trading partner as he ran the company from their kitchen. The name just stuck and from those humble roots grew Britain’s leading homeware business. Yep, turns out the ‘Home of Homes’ is named after someone’s home. Don’t you just love stories like that. They bring me joy. And so it is with the homes we live in. Those perfect reflections of us that make each one unique, different and special. A place where you can bask in the joy of truly feeling at home.

If you reflect on that point for a moment, you realise feeling at home carries a broader, deeper meaning in today’s world; one where joy stems from feeling at home in a literal sense, and also with one’s self. My how the world has changed for the better as my life has kicked along. In my formative years of the 80’s, the pressure to conform was acute to the point of being subversive. A cursory viewing of Russell T Davies’ masterpiece ‘It’s a Sin’ will tell you that. But not so today. While some bemoan the next generation coming through – the Gen Z’s & Alpha’s – I hold a very different view on them. This bunch really will save the world, and their attitude to personal freedom is liberating. Be you, bring the best of you to everything the world has to offer and to hell with what anyone else thinks. And they’re right. Feeling at home in yourself is another rich source of joy, and something to be celebrated.?

So what does all this have to do with the Dunelm you drive past as you head into town of a weekend? Well if you step inside, or hop online to see their full range, you’ll find the brand is something of an Aladdin’s Cave. There is quite literally something for everyone, it’s almost impossible to leave without several items in your basket and even if you do get a little carried away, it never seems to cost too much. Now that is a winning formula and it makes Dunelm the perfect place for anyone seeking to express themselves through their home. Find a way to fuse this with that sense of personal liberation I was describing earlier, and we knew we’d be onto a winner. Ours was a place where you could create your home, your way and nobody else’s – a sanctuary where you truly felt at home.??Now if we could just find a way to express that.

Cut to the summer of 2021, and there we are as a Dunelm team, looking to create a new brand platform based around all these insights; one we could reflect outside and in, to communicate all that was wonderful about our brand. We’d recently partnered with Creature to work with us on the brief, and were sitting in their pad about to review some territories they’d developed, all laid out on the wall by Stu & Ben, our creative guides for the afternoon. Most agencies won’t do that for fear of you reading ahead, but they trusted us. And I was really trying not to look – honest! But as I glanced to my right for no more than 2 seconds, my eyes landed on three words that really caught my eye, before swinging back like a naughty school kid (a familiar feeling) to be met by Stu’s gaze. He knew what I’d seen, he knew I liked it, I knew he liked it and in that moment of no more than 5 seconds I think the whole thing went click. The three words? ‘Dun Your Way’. Now that had a ring to it. The sentiment was simple & clear. With our unrivalled depth & range of products, from bedding by royal appointment to a peacock lamp or tiger vase and everything in between, we were the perfect place to shop for everything you needed. Your home. Dun Your Way. Boom. Mic drop. Roll creds. Well, not quite.

The session ran on, we walked through all the territories, inevitably all got very excited about Dun Your Way as a central idea and plotted the steps to develop it further. On several occasions in my career, I’d seen the beauty of working your name into a line like that. And the ‘made you look’ appeal of misspelling a familiar word?in that way was?hard to resist. Beyond the clever play on words though, it was the broader reach of the idea that appealed most. We could see it being applied to career development, the way people worked in the new hybrid world, the service style of our colleagues, even down to the way they might personalise their uniform – it could all be Dun Your Way.?That’s a powerful rallying cry for any enterprise, and for a business like Dunelm, it felt particularly appropriate. The business was made up of so many warm, welcoming, bright souls who were forward thinking and an absolute joy to work with (yep, there’s that ‘j’ word again). It felt like ‘us’. Now we just needed to give a voice to it – a call to arms if you like to start the movement.

With an Autumn campaign to be delivered, we decided to make that the launch pad for our new idea, comprising a TV spot (60” & 30”) and a fully integrated campaign surrounding it. For our hero piece of film, we cycled round various creative ideas, landing on one we felt met the brief perfectly. The idea was essentially one of contrast, taking you to a dystopian world of conformity, drained of any colour or personality, and juxtaposing this with the world that could be created if something of a revolution occurred; one made possible by Dunelm, of course. The ‘made you look’ trick wasn’t just about words, it was also about colour, and we used our Dunelm green bag to signify the?revolution as it was held proudly aloft by our brave liberator in the ad. Oh and much to my eventual regret, we also worked sonics into our branding through the use of a track that became the anthem for the whole campaign – noughties banger ‘Do Your Thing’ by Basement Jaxx.?Here, take a look at the 60”.

Why the regret on our track selection??Well it was selected as, beyond the clear relevance of the lyrics to our cause, it was something of an ear-worm which would make it memorable. Great when you hear it for the first time, but not when you’ve been round all the loops required to finalise a piece of advertising. Trust me, when you’ve tried to choreograph cushions landing on a sofa to the booms & bangs of that song, you’ll do anything to make it stop! But we were incredibly proud of our work, not least because with limited studio capacity in the UK due to Covid and significant savings available if we went further afield, the ad was shot in Slovenia meaning we had to transport all the furniture out there with the added risk the driver might get detained if they tested positive for the virus. Blimey it was stressful – particularly for Georgie, Ellie & Amy - but the team pulled together brilliantly, managed all the risks and made it happen. A very proud moment for all involved when we finally went to air.

Where TV is concerned, media selections often start with a 60” but it’s important to see what you can achieve in a 30” to get the desired reach and make your budget work harder. I have to say I was particularly pleased with where we landed on our 30”. The track still worked well, we got great exposure for our products and central elements like the logo-swipe at the end landed our branding well. We also managed to retain our couple signing their views on the wonder (or not) of magnolia, one of several ideas carefully blended into the film with Stephen Pipe who directed the work for us.??

The team that constructed & dressed each of the room settings during the shoot - led by Chris & Vicki - did such a fabulous job of showcasing what you can achieve using the products available at Dunelm. Every item in each of these shots was available in store or online when we made the ad. This created a rich store of assets we could use across the campaign to showcase the brand at its best and encourage people to pay us a visit. This is advertising with a purpose after all. It needs to drive visits and clicks. Although not only to sell you something new. The family upcycling their furniture were included to signal a growing focus on helping people make more of the possessions they already had. Not typical behaviour for a retailer, but Dunelm is different and takes it generational responsibilities seriously.

The wider campaign unfolded through October of that year, the TV supported by a mix of radio, digital and print, all underpinned by activity in each store. The work was aired again the following Spring and has been followed up by subsequent campaigns all built around Dun Your Way and using the assets & track first used in 2021. Dunelm continues to go from strength to strength as a business which is a reflection of the collective talents of everyone working there, and hopefully this work is doing its bit to amplify their message to more people across the UK. Dunelm enjoys something bordering on cult status among its loyal fans, such is their passion for the brand. It’s nice to see the fandom spreading.

On a personal note, I’ve had reason to reflect deeply on what’s important to me in recent times, and when I look back on this piece of work and the people I had the pleasure of developing it with, I’m reminded of what matters most in life. Be who you are, proudly and without fear or compromise, feeling at home with yourself and those around you. If you’ve ever taken a stroll down the yellow brick road, you’ll know that Dorothy was right – there really is no place like it.