Spreetail
Shipping Sherpas
A warehouse hires a Sherpa to ship the hard stuff.
Watch the full campaign · 1:25
The Strategy
Spreetail runs the hard part of online retail for brands whose products don't fit in a mailer: trampolines, saunas, kayaks, bags of chicken sand. It buys the inventory, stores it, ships it, and sells it across the big marketplaces. The person it has to reach sits in an office, not a warehouse. They own the marketplace revenue, and they answer for every late delivery they never touched. Spreetail's own line is "We make hard ecommerce easy." The ads had to make that person feel seen without making them the joke.
So the joke goes to the workaround. A warehouse has a shipping problem it can't solve, and it has solved it anyway: it hired a Sherpa. He's in full Everest gear, trying to get a saran-wrapped bicycle up onto one shoulder while a bag of lump charcoal hangs off the other. Burt, the foreman, watches from his desk in a hard hat and safety vest, eating out of a Tupperware labeled "JULIE'S — HANDS OFF." On FaceTime is Steve, already late for a meeting, who only wants to hear that delivery times are better.
The 30-second main ad introduces the Sherpa. The two 15-second ads find him in worse shape each time. In one, he's buried under a pile of bags, a kayak and a flatscreen TV box. In the other, he's stuck in a squat under ten bags of charcoal. Two 6-second reminders bring him back. Every ad plays it straight. The people around him treat the Sherpa as a normal part of operations, the way any team gets used to a workaround that almost works.
The Process
The ads were for the person in the office, but things break in the warehouse. We needed both, and we had one location. Chandler found the way through: a FaceTime call. Steve rides along on Burt's phone, hurrying down a hallway or sitting in his car, and never sets foot in the warehouse. Spreetail loved it, and it solved the location problem in one move.
The products changed too. The first draft had one giant box covered in surcharge stickers. Spreetail wanted range, not just size: the heavy, awkward things its partners really sell. So the Sherpa's loads became a bicycle, charcoal, sandbags, a kayak and a TV.
We shot it all in one day, in a real warehouse that was empty and up for sale. Empty meant we built everything you see: the Sherpa's corner, Burt's desk and the "Days Without Incident" sign on his wall. A green screen behind a window turns the room next door into a busy warehouse that was never there.
That's our director's actual bike in the ads, and the charcoal bags were emptied and refilled with stuffing, so we could stack ten of them on our Sherpa without worrying about giving the poor guy a hernia. And as a testament to the commitment of the actors we work with, the actor playing Burt hates potato salad. Julie's potato salad is one of the ad's key flavor moments, so he ate it take after take. Shout-out to our production assistant, who stayed just out of frame with a potato salad spittoon for in-between takes.
The Reaction
“I’ve been through a million rebrands, and they are all a slog… Very, very well done.”
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“You guys just roll! The project management, your philosophies and approaches to that, just, award-winning. I’ve been through a million rebrands, and they are all a slog. I’ve only had one rebrand experience where I feel very similarly about the project management of all of this. Very, very well done.
The project management and expectation setting was 10 out of 10. I never had to be like ‘What are they working on? What’s happening? Where are we with this?’ You guys were really prescriptive as far as what you needed from me and vice versa, you set the expectation very clearly on deliveries or when you needed more time. And that was fine, wiggle room is expected in this kind of thing. I didn’t feel like I didn’t know what was going on or I didn’t know what I was doing. So I appreciate that we had enough of a discussion up front that you knew what our goals were. I’m so grateful that you were great on the feedback loop, I didn’t feel like our feedback ever threw you guys off. Review calls after each deliverable helped hold someone like me, who is like the conduit here, accountable to a timeline. It just keeps the project moving. And A+ on getting the deliverable along with the video walkthrough, those are so critical because, contextually, you can over-explain something that on paper might not translate the same.”
Sandra Rand VP of B2B Marketing, SpreetailMore like this: the best B2B video ads · how we make them