OMG. What do you do when you’re a respected sports brand that’s being buried under the weight of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign? You get serious about owning your story. That’s what we pitched to Mizuno USA. What? Haven’t heard of Mizuno? That’s understandable. You probably aren’t a professional athlete. Or a soon-to-be professional athlete. Because those people know Mizuno. While Nike was busy making bazillions educating the masses and promoting the romance of athleticism to regular consumers, Mizuno was focused on making great gear for real players. Not just great players. Regular players. Sure, Mizuno had big-time connections. For example, Chipper Jones and Marquis Grissom (pictured below) were actually on Mizuno’s advisory board, making equipment better instead of just getting paid to pose with it. Mizuno’s real passion was for serious athletes at all levels – high school, club, college, majors. When I was an AD at Hyett, Boradbent, and Hiembrodt, we pitched Mizuno as the brand that lives in the locker. Not on the catwalk. In fact, we even lined the conference room with lockers for the presentation. It was great theater.

But let’s step back a sec. So if Mizuno was the real players choice, I needed to show that. Nike was using fashion photographers to represent their ethos. All that glamour wasn’t going to work for us (and we couldn’t afford to do what they were doing anyway). It felt like we had to do the opposite. That’s when I found Doug Menuez. Doug was an amazing young photojournalist (and sweet Jesus you should see what he’s doing now) who had a run-and-gun style that was perfect for capturing the candid grit of what players see and do day-to-day. We countered Nike’s colorful photoshoots with deep, moody, grainy, black and white images and stirring, understated headlines. And we used cheap Dymo tape to deliver our tagline, “Serious Performance”. Because that was the visual language of the locker rooms Mizuno thrived in.

So here’s what we did - because our photography was to be editorial in nature (gritty, raw, and real), you couldn’t fake it. We couldn’t show Mizuno a tight comp with some great image we found with an awesome headline, get approval and then go shoot… — **So here’s what we did -** because our photography was to be editorial in nature (gritty, raw, and real), you couldn’t fake it. We couldn’t show Mizuno a tight comp with some great image we found with an awesome headline, get approval and then go shoot it. No, instead we started by scouting an athlete and location, spend all day shooting them playing, hoping to get emotional gold, pick an image, go to town writing a series of emotional headline/captions for that specific image, and then get it to the client for approval. It was all super risky because it put a lot of the process in the hands of fate (and our excellent photographer). If we came up with nothing at the shoot, we were fucked.

Good news: You get to work on an amazing sports brand. Bad News: Their product ads. This is the worst news you could possibly give an art director. But it was the hard truth. Mizuno just didn’t have the luxury of doing what Nike was Just Doing (see what I did there?) by making a ton of sexy branding ads. So this project was a lot about my making the most elegant product ads I could. Everyone’s seen a baseball glove, so it didn’t have to be huge. And making them small, and the only thing in full color, actually had the same effect as making them huge on the page. We captured the emotion of the sport and instantly telegraphed that Mizuno provided everything you’d need to excel at that sport.