Fred & Farid Shanghai made qilins real to promote a jewelry brand

In the Chinese competitive luxury market, there was little place for the original, modern but unknown high-end jewelry brand Qeelin. Fred&Farid noticed that the name – Qeelin – was inspired from the qilin,  Chinese mythological animal made part lion, part ox and part dragon. For years, the qilin has been represented as sculptures in front of temples or pictures in traditional paintings, but no one ever saw one alive.

To generate awareness and to create the buzz around Qeelin brand, the agency decided to hijack the myth into reality and make Chinese people believe the qilin really did exist.

The content related to the living qilin was gathered under a special hashtag, #babyqilin#, and it became fast a hot topic: new powerful influencers joined the trend by themselves and relayed the story of the baby qilin.

#Babyqilin# was a trending topic for two days, supported by more than 30,000 reposts and 15,000 comments on Weibo. After 4 days, after announcing the identity of the brand behind the campaign, 2.1 million people attended the post reveal on weibo. The story of the campaign generated more than 35M views in just 5 days.

Credits:

Agency: Fred & Farid Shanghai
Title: #Babyqilin#
Advertiser/Client: Qeelin (Kering Group)

Chief Creative Officer: Fred & Farid
Creative Director: Feng Huang
Copywriters: Aser Cao, Frankie Shen
Art Directors: Pierrick Jégou, Wei Tang, Linh Vu, Pauline Pérol
Brand Supervisor: Guillaume Brochard
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Guillaume Leroux
Retouchers: Am Wang, Henry Lam
Producer: Wang Chen
Media Strategists: Yi Zhang, Sen Liu