Penguin Onesies for Christmas

The John Lewis Christmas advertising campaign launched this week with the premiere of “Monty the Penguin’s Christmas“, a multi-million pound sequel to last year’s equally heart-rending “The Bear and the Hare” story.  This campaign was credited with helping increase the retailer’s sales by 6.9 per cent over the previous year. John Lewis has earned a reputation for setting the standard for heart-warming Christmas advertising. Their TV ads show short stories of how Christmas presents can bring people, or snowmen, or penguins together. Monty the penguin will also feature on a selection of Christmas merchandise including penguin onesies of course. But this year the retailer goes much further in story telling by using the latest technology and rolling out in-store experiential activity as part of its 2014 Christmas sales campaign. Monty’s Den uses innovative immersive technology to tell the stories of the ad’s characters – Sam, Monty and Mabel. It rolled out this week in 42 stores across the UK.

Independently, we are working on some new designs for our adult onesie collection and are minded to introduce penguin onesies as a tribute to that featured in the film Zoolander. This will have a light blue base colour and feature a cute penguin print. We’ll probably produce it in 100% cotton so that it can be worn year round. Although fleece is soft and cosy it tends to be too warm for summer.

Other designs we are playing with at the moment include “Seuss Funzee” which will be red and white horizontal stripes, and “Harlequin Funzee” which we are thinking will be purple and green diamonds.  Seuss we will probably produce in fleece and Harlequin will again be cotton as it should be popular for summer parties and festivals. If you have any better ideas please let us know. Some of our most popular funzees are the result of suggestions from our customers.