• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, December 5, 2013

Let’s face it: When your brand stands for stress relief and serenity, December is the month to shake your moneymaker. So Lucy Activewear, the women’s yoga and sports brand, is launching #ChildsPose, which it hopes will be one of the season’s most shareable social media campaigns for young women. 

“We wanted to reach her at the moment when we’re most relevant,” Dawn Dzedzy, Lucy’s director of marketing, tells Marketing Daily. “We don’t have the paid-media budget our competitors do, so we wanted to create a very authentic, lighthearted experience.” 

The brand hired actress Elizabeth Banks (think more “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and less “The Hunger Games”) to direct a video that includes six seasonal stressors, from a brother pointing out that your ovaries are aging to a coworker giving you a handmade present when all you got her was a card. Each causes the woman to retreat, breathing deeply, into yoga’s ubiquitous escape hatch: Child’s pose. See it here. 

“We wanted Elizabeth Banks because we thought the video should have that kind of levity,” says Chris Lange, co-founder of Mono, Lucy’s Minneapolis-based agency. “She’s got her own spin, the kind of funny that really connects with Lucy’s audience.”

“For us, the idea is that we continue to relate to our customer in a knowing way,” adds Dzedzy. “We don’t have to explain a lot about why she likes to do yoga, run, CrossFit or whatever. We can just use a light touch – she knows stress relief is a big part of why she works out.”

In addition to the video, the company is pushing out funny #ChildsPose GIFs, using Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and other social sites.

The campaign follows the brand’s October installation of a motion-activated light forest in Boston, which is now rolling out to additional markets. 

Lucy, owned by VF Corp. and based in Alameda, Calif., currently has 60 stores, and is expanding. And it is now available through such retailers as Dick’s, REI and Zappos.