SUNNIE READS
x COACH
Cannes Lions Bronze — Creative Strategy, 2025
The Insight
Gen Z are the storytelling generation. 75% aspire to be creators, not just consumers. Book culture was having a genuine renaissance — BookTok, library meetups, physical books making a comeback in the digital age — but the freedom of self-expression through storytelling was simultaneously under threat. Coach's "Courage to Be Real" platform needed a cultural entry point that felt earned by this audience, not sold to them.
The Idea
Take Hello Sunshine's authority in women's storytelling and Reese's Book Club's proven model — then democratize it. Rather than a top-down celebrity book club, build something community-first: a Gen Z digital book club that centered diverse, authentic voices and invited participation rather than observation. A space where what you read and what you wear could both be acts of self-expression.
My Role
As creative strategist, I conceived the partnership model directly with Coach's CMO and built the full roadmap, infrastructure, and customized Coach integrations from scratch. I collaborated with the Hello Sunshine brand team to bring three pillars to life:
A Sunnie Advisory Board of Gen Z voices who shaped the content and community from the inside. A Coach Book Nook activation at SunnieFest — a physical, branded experience where the partnership came to life in the real world. And an ongoing content and community engine spanning custom social content and digital newsletter integrations that kept the conversation going beyond the event.
The Result
The "Explore Your Story" campaign — of which Sunnie Reads was the Hello Sunshine cornerstone — was awarded a Cannes Lions Bronze for Creative Strategy in 2025. Coach's CMO Joon Silverstein credited the Hello Sunshine partnership with helping create something that felt "authentic to Gen Z — bringing together storytelling, book culture, and community in a way that invited people to participate, not just observe." Around the same period, Coach climbed to #4 on the Lyst Index, ahead of Prada, Bottega Veneta, and Chloé, with significant Gen Z customer growth in the US.