McDonald's puts emerging Black designers centre stage with Threadsetters zine driving 63% in page readership

Overview

McDonald's Black & Positively Golden "Change of Fashion" programme backs emerging Black American designers with grants and mentorship, in an industry where Black talent accounts for 7.3%. REVOLT brought me and my team in to work on it.

A grant programme lives or dies on how many people know it exists. McDonald's didn't need another press release, and the five designers deserved better than a landing page with their headshots on it.

We named the campaign Threadsetters, after what these designers actually do. They set the tone and the direction that the rest of Black fashion follows.

Approach

This audience treats fashion as part of its own story, not as a catalogue. So we built a digital zine rather than a campaign page. Something worth opening on its own terms, so the mission travels through culture instead of arriving as advertising.

The look came out of the designers' own studios. We went in and built the aesthetic from what was actually there, the rawness and imperfection of fabric and thread. 3D objects and textures for real denim and craftsmanship, polaroids, hand-drawn notes, the scrapbook feel of a working sketchbook.

The zine runs in three parts. The designers open in their own words on what shapes their style. Then the history, the lineage of Black creativity in denim and street style. Then a full profile spread each, their story alongside the work itself, from Nia Thomas's Resort Ready Knitwear through the rest of the cohort.

The identity was built around it, with typography and colour held tight to McDonald's brand guidelines. And we took it off the screen. Social assets, physical event merchandising and wayfinding, so the programme showed up the same way in the room as it did online. All of it responsive, because this audience reads on a phone.

Outcomes

The zine pulled 601K readers and more than 3 million page views.

People didn't land and leave either. Across eight sections, the average reader got through 63% of it in a single visit. And it kept pulling, roughly 1,700 readers and 8,600 page views a day, sustained rather than a launch-week spike that faded.

A grant programme became somewhere people chose to spend time. That's the whole job on work like this. Get the attention honestly, and the talent gets seen.