Suicide is the second highest cause of death among 15-29-year-olds, with one of the major factors being that young people simply aren’t talking about their mental health. But talking can save lives.  

Working with mental health charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), our challenge was to remove the stigma from the topic and get young people starting conversations about their mental health naturally and openly with their friends and family.

Through a groundbreaking partnership with Topshop and Topman – brands which play a meaningful role in the lives of our target demographic – we were able to bring the notion of self-care to life through a unique, mental health-inspired clothing range with a big difference. 

We took the concept of the ubiquitous ‘care label’ found within garments and made it about people, not products – including messaging such as ‘don’t handle problems on your own’, ‘talk to a mate to iron them out’ and ‘completely spun out? Call CALM’. We incorporated these into an oversized ‘self-care’ label, which also included guidance on how to contact CALM, and put it proudly on the outside of this clothing range, designed in partnership with Topshop specifically to raise awareness of the importance of talking about problems.

The results

It was an idea aimed at getting people talking, and it got people talking. We reached over 75 million people with our message to ‘Let what’s inside, out.’

It became a news item, generating over 200 pieces of earned media, even Lorainne featured the collection on her TV show. This led to our collection trending on launch day selling over 2.3k garments.

We got teenagers talking to each other, with 21k men and women engaged with the campaign - a huge success for a charity usually associated with just men.

But crucially, those who really needed to talk, felt encouraged to contact CALM, and talk. The number of searches for CALM doubled on launch day, then young people contacted the charity in the ways they knew how. Some talked via direct message on social, in fact 25% more people did. While CALM’s online chat received 30% more requests to talk.