Stripes by Naomi Watts Social posts
Stripes — a beauty and wellness brand focused on menopause health, founded by Naomi Watts. ‘Menopause’ can be a dirty word to many, and suffers from a stigma that it’s all hot flashes and sweating and the end of life as you know it. That is precisely the tired perception that Stripes wanted to break. Stripes asked me to consult and design content to bring some millennial-leaning humor into their social media posts leading up to their official launch.
My Role
ϟ Creative consultation
☁ Conceptualization & discovery
⁂ Graphic design
✂ Video editing
✎ Copywriting
The Challenge
In partnership with Amyris, Naomi and her team developed Stripe’s brand architecture along with a beautiful set of guidelines, including rigorous rules pertaining to the visuals and voice of Stripes. Prior to the official launch in September 2022, they needed someone to come in a break some of those rules and further develop a variation of their brand voice for social media. Naomi is a smart, funny, badass woman and she wanted the brand to reflect that.
Stripes most important message is that menopause is not the end of your life — it can be the beginning of an even better second half. But how to communicate this when 1/3rd of people that go through menopause won’t even bring it up with their doctors?
My solution was a combination of science-based facts, straight-forward no-bullshit language, and of course, humor.
Goals
After getting to know the brand through its guidelines and research, I sat down to brainstorm post concepts. I had three goals in mind:
Speak to Stripe’s core audience of (peri)menopausal people ages 40+ in a voice that was encouraging and smart but also amusing, giving permission to poke fun at and even embrace menopause.
Create a process that would allow the Amyris team to easily build upon once the reigns were passed back.
Encourage engagement with the community.
Solutions: A series of series
In order to ensure the project would be effective beyond three months, I wanted to build multiple series that had longevity and scale into many posts over time. The following concepts were built to last and be shared by the community, adding to the follower count and engagement.
Spoiler Alerts
In doing research, I came across so much information that I was never aware of, for example, you shouldn’t drink alcohol because it may make your symptoms worse. But in every depiction of a stereotypical menopausal woman I had seen, they were downing a giant glass of chardonnay?! I proposed a series of posts, crowdsourced from followers, of what to expect that you weren’t expecting. The goal was to be both relatable to the older part of the audience, and educate the younger part that was about to enter a new, scary phase of their lives.
Two Truths and a Lie
With a similar goal in mind as Spoiler Alerts, I wanted to debunk myths woman have heard their entire lives about menopause or new ones that have cropped up in the age of social media. This series would present the audience with 3 “facts”, one of which was not true. The audience was encouraged to guess which was the lie. The second slide in the post would reveal the answer, explaining the real facts.
Reaction Gifs
In the account’s early days, it saw a post go viral of Emma Thompson dancing, with the caption that says ‘when you remember the second half of your life is better than the first.’ With a well-known woman at the helm of Stripes, it was clear that its social followers were fans of other known, fearless women going through menopause. I created a series of relatable scenarios in a menopausal person’s journey, accompanied by a gif with an amusing reaction. (seen at the top of the case study.)
The Penis Game
Have you ever heard of ‘the Penis Game’? It’s a game where you say ‘penis’ over and over, starting very quietly then getting louder and louder until you’re screaming “PENIS!!!” And this is all done in public, preferably in a quiet location. The library perhaps? Well, why do penises get all the fun? I proposed a series of simple gifs encouraging followers to take back words related to menopause that might otherwise be icky to them. In a world where going viral is the gateway to success, the end goal of this series was to spread the word about Stripes and remove a the embarrassment behind certain words. (seen above.)
