WIGGLE X ADIDAS
HIKERS AGAINST HATRED
BRIEF
Our ongoing retained brief: celebrate the athlete in everyone and help them get their Wiggle on regardless of ability, gender, race or religion.
And so, when a sickening news article appeared about a group of Muslim hikers suffering racist abuse, we saw an opportunity for the brand to reach out in solidarity.
IDEA
When it came to timings, Ramadan felt like the perfect calendar moment for us to help the wider UK better understand Islam and its values. One of the key tenets of the Holy Month is to pray, facing Mecca, five times a day. Which gave us not one, but two ideas.
First, let’s simply place signposts towards Mecca throughout the English countryside. Hikers are very used to seeing little wooden signs pointing them in the direction of travel. This felt like a really heartwarming and celebratory way to take the tropes and visual register of rural England and use them to tell the story of multicultural Britain. Traditionally Muslims would have used the position of the sun to locate the Holy City. However, the rural Peak District isn’t quite Saudi Arabia and sometimes the sun isn’t quite as visible due to cloud cover or pouring rain…
Speaking of rain, nothing ruins a prayer mat like boggy marshland. And so, working with a Muslim-owned studio, QM Design, we designed the world’s first weatherproof prayer mat.
Manufactured in partnership with Adidas Terrex, the mats went on sale on the Wiggle site, with all proceeds being given to the Active Inclusion Network.
RESULTS
Now you’re probably thinking.. but surely the announcement of signs pointing to Mecca dotted across the green and pleasant countryside of England must have enraged rural NIMBYists and gammons of the shires. You would be completely right. Talk radio switchboards have never run so hot. But this time, we were prepared. First we went out with our announcement of the signs and the prayer mats. We landed over 100 pieces of top tier coverage. Hypebeast even described it as a “Sports Prayer Mat” which sounded pretty cool.
We were especially pleased to land some really good hits in Muslim focused media, so often overlooked by the PR industry, with British Muslim Magazine being especially effusive in its praise of the campaign, describing it as “revolutionary” and saying “this could not have happened at a better time.” It’s definitely one of our proudest ever pieces of coverage.
