Title	THE RAG BAG
Brand	UNIFORMS FOR THE DEDICATED
Product/Service	SHOPPING BAG
Category	D04. Structural Design
Entrant Company	DDB STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
Advertising Agency	DDB STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
Production Company	B-REEL Stockholm, SWEDEN

Name	Company	Position
Joel Ekstrand	Ddb Stockholm	Art Director
Nick Christiansen	Ddb Stockholm	Copywriter
Fredrik Simonsson	Ddb Stockholm	Art Director
Magnus Jakobsson	Ddb Stockholm	Copywriter
Katarina Bäcklund	Ddb Stockholm	Account Director
Linus Östberg	Ddb Stockholm	Designer
Anna Hellenberg	Ddb Stockholm	Print Manager
Leif Blondell	Ddb Stockholm	Graphic Designer
Jojo Brännström	Ddb Stockholm	Digital Director
August Björnberg	Ddb Stockholm	Digital Developer
Christian Björnerhag	Ddb Stockholm	Photoshop Artist
Gustav Hamdal	Ddb Stockholm	Planner
Haris Badic	Ddb House	Editor
Simon Strand	Simon Strand PR	PR
Fredrik Wikholm	Uniforms for the Dedicated	Creative Director/co founder
Victor Persson	Uniforms for the Dedicated	Marketing Director

Brief Explanation

Uniforms For The Dedicated is a Swedish menswear brand that have a business model based on a more sustainable fashion: The opportunity to rent a suit instead of buying and the fact that they’re using recycled fibers for new collections are two examples of how this is practiced. This is a standard they have set for themselves, and also one that they want to set for the whole fashion industry.

The Brief

The big fashion brands are built around cheap production, cheap garments and short seasons. We spend as much money on clothes today as we did 10 years ago, but are buying a considerably larger amount of garments. In 2013 Swedes bought 12,5 kilos of textiles per person, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. 8 kilos of those will get thrown in the trash instead of reused or recycled. At the same time, not many big labels are acting on this, despite grand strategies and lengthy presentations about sustainability. So we wanted to walk the walk. And we started with our customers – how do we make them want to be ambassadors for our vision?

How the final design was conceived

We wanted to find a way to make our consumers engage with this issue – a way that was so easy to use that you could not NOT go ahead and act. We started thinking about how you shop, and what is the one thing that unites every shopper, not regarding style, taste or income level. We landed on the one thing every shopper needs – the shopping bag. The shopping bag is the ultimate symbol for the “take, make, waste”-mentality. You buy something, and you bring it home. The insight came from the thought that if you’ve bought something new, you surely have something old to donate. With the insight of one in, one out we decided to design the shopping bag so it transforms from the vessel of one in, to the vessel of one out.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

When you buy something new, you can donate something old – The Rag Bag is the shopping bag that becomes a channel for donations. Every garment sold in the Uniforms For the Dedicated store gets put in a Rag Bag. At home, remove the new garment, flip the bag inside out and insert an old garment. The bag is now a postage vessel, pre-addressed and sealed, with the postage paid for. Put it in the post box and it will go to Stockholm City Mission where another cycle will be added to its life. The pilot project included 600 bags, out of which over 300 has been utilized to recycle garments. Average purchase have increased with 123%, total sales with 157% and returning customers have increased with 225% compared to last period. We also initialized an e-commerce solution where any brand that wanted could order The Rag Bag to use within their business. This has produced over 1.100.000 declarations of interest from national and international businesses, and major publications have reported on it. The Rag Bag proves that a small, but significant, design modification of a product that we otherwise take for granted can cause transformation and create change.