Coldest Dub

Client: The North Face

Despite a commanding lead in the outdoor category, The North Face had a challenge: the brand’s ubiquity was turning off a younger, style-driven audience. This audience has disproportionate influence so it was critical to win them back, but with word-of-mouth and consideration in decline, relevance would have to be earnt.

Rather than advertise at them, we earned our way back into culture through collaboration. Recognising the brand’s historic connection with Grime music, we used the genre’s 2025 resurgence as the moment to re-establish the brand’s relevance. We created ‘The Coldest Dub,’ a remix competition created with and for the Grime community. Putting collaboration at its heart, we partnered with iconic Grime MC D Double E to provide an original vocal namechecking the brand, DJ AG to drive participation and credibility, and Culted to connect with our social-first style audience at scale. Producers were invited to remix a video of D Double E performing in his The North Face jacket, turning every entry into an authentic, creator-led piece of earned brand media. Working with a network of creators, the campaign quickly spread beyond Instagram and TikTok to Reddit, SoundCloud, YouTube and club culture, generating hundreds of original tracks and sustained cultural visibility for the brand. Thanks to the official release of the single and countless versions being played in clubs around the world to this day, the line “I’m in my North Face jacket doing a lot” continues to reverberate through the culture – an endorsement media can’t buy.