A big surprise for little ones

The challenge

In 2019 Bol launched its new corporate identity. It’s clean, colourful and in-your-face. They updated their website, made campaign materials en showcased shiny new gift cards. But it turns out… What’s colourful and in-your-face for us adults, is pretty boring for kids. I was asked to design a gift card that would grab a kid’s attention and put a smile on their face.

The solution

I used Bol’s existing gift card format (a card, a sleeve and an envelope) and gave it a playful twist. I chose to use ALL their colours and put on-brand illustrations of things kids could buy with this gift card on the sleeve and envelope. I made a few different variations and had the kids of my colleagues and friends tell me which one they liked best. 

I wanted to make the gift card a gift itself. Something they could play with while having to wait for their parents to order their toys. The answer: let’s turn the toy inspired illustrations into stickers. They could use these to customise their gift card. To know which one is theirs. To show everyone what they’re planning to buy with it. Or maybe just to decorate their annoying little brother.

We had the cards printed and organised a photo shoot to get some cool campaign materials:

The end result

A few weeks in we, unfortunately, discovered there’s a lot of regulations we needed to take into account when producing and selling a product containing stickers. This would take a while. In order to put the gift cards online before Christmas and Sinterklaas we decided to create a simplified version 1 while we discussed possibilities with the compliance department.

If you have a kid's birthday coming up or just want to see the live product.. You can find the gift card here.

On-brand socials

I also got to help implement Bol’s new corporate identity into their social posts. As a designer I supported its very creative (and award-winning) social media team in putting fun content online, such as: