The Brief

New Customers. Many clothes and apparel manufacturing practices harm the environment. To add to the problem, “fast fashion” causes consumers to overbuy. They consider textiles as disposables. The challenge is, people in China rarely or never associate shopping with harming the environment. We decide to reveal the blood on their hands just as they’re about to buy clothes, on the China’s largest platform for textile consumption, Taobao, where 35 billion sales turnover is generated for a single day!

Creative Execution

"You Kill When You Overbuy" hits the red-handed shoppers at the most relevant time but most unexpected place, right at the moment of purchase on ecommerce. This creates social value for influencers and media to shape public opinions in overconsumption. Greenpeace makes its point by being true to its bold, controversial actions.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

We hijacked Taobao and sold items that cause the most dumping pollution; instead of showing fashion items our “shop” displays the photos of pollution problems i.e. dead fish, dead birds, etc. This awakened the shoppers to take a pledge to "think twice before you buy" and created a social movement to stop overconsumption.

Results

"Within 7 days, Taobao Hijack won coverage from over 70 publications and over 20,000 positive social mentions supporting ""Taobao Hijack"" on Weibo and WeChat. Over 7000 supporters took a pledge to “Think Twice before you buy”. On the 8th day, Taobao found out and closed our shops. But the fire had been ignited. With zero prompting, anonymous shops mushroomed, following our act of hijacking Taobao. The movement has just begun. "