Founded in Annecy, France in 1961, Cricket Lighters is one of the largest producers of pocket lighters in the world, producing high-quality lighters that last 2,000 times.
Cricket Lighters have always championed passion, innovation and individuality. They developed a design technology in the 2000s that enabled two nylon colors in one lighter body, which means no two lighters are alike.
To celebrate this, they create several limited edition lighters for their global clients each year.
Global creativity
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To help celebrate their 60th anniversary, Cricket Lighters turned to the 99designs community to help bring passion, innovation and individuality to their limited edition pocket lighter range. Since the Cricket Lighters customer base is global, it seemed like a perfect fit to work with global creatives to produce these.
The Cricket Lighters brand team ran their first ever design contest. With so many awesome designs, the Cricket Lighters team asked their audience to vote for their favorites via Instagram Stories. The deserving 5 winning designs were created by, ES STUDIO, F O N T A N A, Ceabay, BigLidovski, and _isObel_.
This initial campaign was a great success in terms of brand engagement, running for over 2 weeks on social media and generating over 2000 votes. Cricket Lighter found that this collaborative and global approach to design really captured the imagination of Cricket Lighter fans around the world, and helped bring an element of surprise and individuality to their campaign.
With this success, Cricket Lighters now wanted to run multiple campaigns for their limited edition lighters and looked to 99d Studio to support them with creative direction and to scale up the production of these campaigns on their behalf.
Strategic development
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99d Studio partnered Cricket Lighters with Cristian Costea, a freelance creative director at 99d Studio and Cannes Lion winner. Cristian worked with the Cricket team to understand their goals and brand strategy, and to help deliver the quarterly campaigns with consistency.
The challenge was to once again work with the community to inspire fresh ideas, but also to understand how we could also ensure the brand sentiment of Cricket Lighters was carried through the campaign.
We developed a new creative brief, which asked creatives to:
- Imagine you are with a group of friends, and you take your Cricket Lighter out of your pocket. The goal is that your friends will be curious about the illustration on the lighter and start a conversation about it.
- Create a design that comprises the core values and art direction of the Cricket Lighters brand: “simplicity, confidence, playfulness.”
These two creative prompts were to ensure we could inspire variety and uniqueness, yet convey the brand values consistently, so there could be a running thread through each campaign.
Innovation and brand consistency
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Over 800 designers brought their creative spark to this contest. With 99d Studio managing creative feedback and guidance on behalf of the Cricket Lighters brand team, we were able to ensure there was a connection to the brief and that the Cricket Lighters color palettes were used across the range of designs.
A shortlist of 30 designs, selected for their interpretation of the brief, were circulated with Cricket Distributors, and the top 12 finalists went to a public vote via Instagram Stories.
This time 8 unique designs were selected, bringing a range of ideas into the mix. Some incorporated the lighters in a fun way, while others brought to life imaginary worlds.
All 8 design collections by MaryRay, Twoolw, kngjrmy, Paula Ambrosio, gamboling, Evelyn Dias, maspoko and Ega Elanda captured the essence of “simplicity, confidence, playfulness” in their own way, and worked seamlessly with a little flash of the idiosyncratic flame red of the Cricket Lighter brand in the “Cricket Eye”—i.e. the red dot that can be found at the top of the lighter.
Get your limited edition Cricket Lighter
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These gorgeous limited edition collections are now being produced and circulated to Cricket Lighters distributors around the world. We’re excited to see which of these limited edition pocket lighters hit the shelves this quarter.
For more information about the Cricket Lighters Special Editions, you can check the New Arrivals section of the Cricket Lighters website.
