Every once in a blue moon, a project lands in our laps whose pure weirdness and utter lack of guardrails cause a collective dopamine spike among our team. It happened in the fall of 2021, when Polartec called Thread looking for help with the Polartec Family Album, a social media campaign that was part spoof and part celebration, all with the intent of going viral.
The deal was this: Polartec had just wrapped a contest in which they gathered customer photos dating back to the ’80s (think feathered hair and untold yards of turquoise fleece). Our job was to write made-up captions for those photos following just one piece of creative direction: “Go further than you think you should.”
The Thread team got to work writing one-sentence stories about time travelers, alligator wrestlers, yeti hallucinations, gorpcore Santa Clauses and Tibetan drive-thrus. It was a unique chance to flaunt our comedic writing chops, and the resulting work was unsettlingly good.
While Polartec’s live campaign ultimately went in a different direction, a few of our captions did make the cut. Here they are — if you want to see more, just ask; we’d be happy to share them with you.