• by Christine Champagne , December 29, 2006

The dangers of mystery fabrics exposed

On a mission to deter shoppers from buying clothes made of mystery fabrics (think synthetics with long, hard-to-pronounce names), Cotton Inc. launched a contest on its Web site, TheFabricofOurLives.com, inviting consumers to submit mystery fabric horror stories. The contest drew an impressive response, receiving upwards of 15,000 submissions, all about the pitfalls of donning mystery fabric.

Obviously, this idea was ripe for development. Cotton's agency, DDB New York, created a parody, MysteryFabric.com, partnering with Cotton Inc.'s information technology department and Boston-based Atomic Mouse.

"The whole site grew out of what these thousands of people wrote in," says Joseph Cianciotto, DDB creative director. In addition to featuring re-enactments of six standout stories culled from submissions to the contest, MysteryFabric offers games, quizzes, and downloads. Banner ads running on sites such as People.com drive traffic to MysteryFabric.com. "Our goal is to get people [specifically fashion-conscious women 18 to 34] to start looking at labels and noticing the difference in quality between mystery fabrics and cotton," Cianciotto says.

According to the agency's research, women in the target demographic don't often bother to check labels when they're shopping.

"The under 30 set was brought up with synthetics," Cianciotto explains. "What we found is that they are agnostic in their approach to what clothes are made of."

Will a visit to MysteryFabric convince these fabric-agnostic women to worship cotton? OMMA convened a panel of digital creatives consisting of Arnold Worldwide's Sasha Koren, Hillary Evans of Brand Buzz, a unit of Y&R, and Dotglu's Aric Cheston to assess the effort.

Sitting around a laptop at a coffee shop in New York's Soho, we call up MysteryFabric and are greeted by an animated pink smiley face cheerfully bouncing around on a black background. Then the home page pops up. To the left there is a pink question mark asking, "What are you wearing?" To the right, eight clickable bars, including "Fashion Victim Files," "Caught On Tape Videos," "Fun and Games," and "Downloads."

OMMA: What's your reaction to this opening animation and home page?

Evans: If this site is about fabric, it doesn't have a textural feel. Maybe it goes down that path. Right now, though, I'm not sure what the direction is. The style makes me think of the early '90s. It's not so professional looking, which I guess could support this idea that mystery fabric is sort of half-assed - if you buy mystery fabric, you're getting something that's half-made. But I would say that there wasn't really a point of view right away at the front door.

Cheston: It looks like a bit of a grab bag to me. There are a lot of tactics here. This home page screams for a little bit of editing.

Koren: I really liked the animation. The bounciness felt fun, and stylistically, I responded to it from an animation/design standpoint. I think if I came to this totally cold, I wouldn't necessarily have a sense of what the site is about. But given the topic, I think that maybe that's okay - it's supposed to be a mystery.

Cheston: The mystery fabric thing is a cool idea.

We go to the "Caught on Tape Videos," which are obviously staged, and watch one in which a woman struggles to pull up her pants while running on a treadmill - ultimately, she falls off. Everyone laughs.

Koren: That should be on the home page. That's hilarious!

Moving on to "Fashion Victim Files," we see actresses performing dramatic readings of stories submitted by real women.

OMMA: How do you feel about the use of actresses to tell these stories as opposed to the real women who sent them in?

Evans: I would rather see the real person. Using an actress may be safer, but I think if you could have spent the time and captured real girls telling their stories, it would have been much more entertaining.

Cheston: It works that the "Caught on Tape Videos" are staged. But the staged testimonials are a little weird.

Koren: I think these are one of the funniest things on the site. It is weird to have it acted out, but weird in kind of a funny, silly way, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don't remember ever seeing another site that acted out reader submissions.

In "Fun and Games," we check out the "Mystery Fabrics Name Generator," then Cheston plays a game in which he has to move a shopping bag to catch cotton clothes falling from above.

OMMA: Does the content in the "Fun and Games" section enhance the site?

Cheston: Looking at the site as a whole, there is everything you could possibly have here - video, games, e-cards. I wish they'd chosen one or two things and done them really well. I wonder how engaged the user is really going to be and whether they're going to go through all this stuff. If you had pushed one or two of these sections a lot further, you'd have done something that would really capture the user's attention.

OMMA: There is an extensive section of downloads offering buddy icons, wallpaper, and screensavers. Do you think people want Mystery Fabric wallpaper?

Cheston: I don't think so.

Evans: Some of the things here feel like ... more time spent. There is not a lot of visceral content about fabric or the emotional reasons why cotton is good. They could do more to "cotton-ify" the site.

OMMA: In terms of strategy, does this effort hit the mark?

Koren: I think that strategically this site is really on it, and there is a lot of really great support content in here. But the question I have is: As a user, where is the piece that's going to make me take the next step and go out and buy cotton?