From “the purple box” to a film that stopped the room.
How a two-hour Storyline Workshop turned a check-the-box internal video into an emotional brand film Lansinoh now uses with retailers, partners, and consumers — and we never picked up a camera.
Lansinoh has been helping moms for decades. Ask most people what the brand stands for, though, and you'd get a blank look. Maybe “the purple box.” A founder-led company, built by a mom solving her own problem — and almost none of that story was reaching the people who needed to feel it.
The team had just finished a major brand repositioning. It was sharp. It was also about 70 pages long, and it lived in a deck. You had to read it to get it.
They came to us to bring it to life. What started as an internal video turned into something nobody on the team expected.
A brand people couldn't feel.
The earlier brand work — a refresh from around 2020 — already felt dated. Flower crowns. Beds of roses. The kind of polish that reads as a brand checking boxes instead of telling the truth. It talked at moms instead of with them.
The new direction went deeper. Not “we stand for moms” in a loud, protest kind of way. Something warmer — the idea that it isn't just mom, it's mom and baby, together, through the messy, fast, once-in-a-lifetime chapters. The tagline: love your time together.
Great words. The trouble with words on a page is that you have to read them to feel anything.
Everyone already says “we love you, mom.”
Every competitor in the category was already saying some version of “we love you, mom.” Even no-name brands on Amazon. Saying it louder was never going to make Lansinoh stand out.
The brand needed people to feel the difference, not read about it. Internally, so a global organization could rally behind one direction. Externally, so retail buyers and consumers could see where the brand was headed — and actually believe it.
A workshop, not a shoot.
Before anyone talked cameras or budgets, we ran the team through a two-hour Storyline Workshop.
Here's the honest before-and-after. The client walked in treating the video as a box to check — something they had to produce to get buy-in. By the end of the two hours, that had flipped.
It stopped being about ‘let's make something better than the other team did.’ It just became about ‘this is really meaningful for the brand.’
Julie Kelly, LansinohWe dug into the stories behind the brand, pressure-tested the messaging, and ran a keyword exercise that landed the whole team on the same handful of words: love, once-in-a-lifetime joy, beautiful mess, we, compassion, authentic. No flower crowns. No filters. Just the raw truth, told with warmth.
That alignment is what made everything after it fast.
We never picked up a camera.
This is the part we're proud of. There was no big production budget and no time for an original shoot. What the team had was scrappy: some Super 8 footage, phone interviews with real moms and one dad, and a folder of photography.
So we built the campaign out of what already existed. We combined their footage with cinematic stock and a few shots we created to fill the gaps, then shaped all of it into something that felt like a documentary. Real and raw, but beautiful.
From that, we delivered more than one video:
- A 60-to-90-second brand film, voiceover-driven, pulled from the brand's own manifesto
- A 2-to-3-minute, interview-driven story featuring real moms
- A set of “mom moments,” micro-stories that highlight one mom at a time
- Short social cutdowns in vertical and square, with captions
One brand. One pile of imperfect footage. A whole campaign.
The brand film
Real moms, in their own words
Mom moments & social cuts
The film that stopped the room.
We screened the films at Lansinoh's all-company town hall.
Everybody loved them and they clapped, and you could tell people were trying not to cry.
Julie Kelly, LansinohThe CFO, who by his own admission doesn't pay much attention to marketing, messaged afterward to say he loved the mom moments and wanted to know where they'd use them next.
Then the work outgrew its original job. What started as an internal piece became the thing the team now reaches for in front of retail buyers, partners, and consumers.
Having this video is so much more believable. It brings it to life. I wish I'd had it when I sat in front of that buyer earlier in the year.
Julie Kelly, LansinohThe mom moments — which weren't even part of the original plan — turned into some of the most useful assets of all.
Most brands start with the camera.
They book a shoot, gather footage, and hope a story shows up in the edit.
We start with the story. The two hours we spent in that workshop are the reason a modest budget and a folder of imperfect footage turned into something that made a room go quiet. Not because we filmed something beautiful — because we knew exactly what we were building before we built it.
Your team is way faster than we are and just on it. I had zero complaints. Can you keep editing these for me forever?
Julie Kelly, LansinohDoing work people should feel?
If your brand does something that matters and you're tired of marketing that looks like everyone else's, that's our sweet spot. You don't need a huge budget or a week-long shoot — sometimes you just need the right plan and the footage you already have.
Let's find the story worth telling.