Every idea has an expiration date. Somebody at work pointed out the one exception: bad gifts. So we built a swap meet for them.
Role
Designer
Organization
Barkley
Barkley had a company philosophy: every idea has an expiration date. Somebody pointed out the one exception. Bad gifts don’t expire. The sweater from an aunt, the useless thing you (for one reason or another) can’t throw away, it just moves to the back of a closet and waits. It survives moves, breakups, divorces, and deaths. It outlives the people who gave it to you.
Bad Gift Emporium was Barkley’s holiday microsite that worked like a swap meet for terrible gifts. You uploaded a photo of the worst thing you’d been given, wrote up what made it so bad, and it went on the wall with everyone else’s. Other people rated how bad it truly was. If you wanted to be rid of yours, you could tag it as available, and if someone was interested, the two of you sorted out the shipping between yourselves.
The site looked like the hallway at your grandmother’s house, or the Byers house from Stranger Things a good ten years before Stranger Things existed. A looping music box in the corner could be switched on for the full festive-creepy effect.
Barkley built it with a team of writers, designers, and Flash developers. I designed the site and shot the photography it was made of: the collage elements that became the hallway, and the seed set of bad gifts that filled the wall before anyone had uploaded their own. The sound design and the video were mine too.
The website was a hit with the press. PCMag, USA Today, BuzzFeed, Neatorama, Thrillist, and a stack of ad industry blogs here and overseas ran stories about it.
