Washington Wizards 2022-23 City Edition Uniform Reveal
On March 29, we unveiled the Wizards 2022-23 City Edition Uniforms. What made this reveal so different was that we did it in conjunction with our friends across town - the Washington Nationals. Both teams had Cherry Blossom themed uniforms, something that fans in the city have been clamoring for for years.
We worked hard on this release and saw our hard work pay off with over 3 million impressions in just the first day.
Below I’ll walk you through how we approached this.
We started with a simple tease. An animation that showed our logo morph into cherry blossom petals. We intentionally kept it kind of vague as we were also promoting cherry blossom themed NFTs at the same time and wanted to have a little bit of misdirection with our fans to start conversations of “Is this a jersey or NFTs?” as our jersey had leaked a few weeks prior and fans knew they were coming.
Getting a quote tweet from Bradley Beal, our star player, was a big help too. I think this added to the conversation by having him chime in with a cryptic tweet. This pushed the conversation more from “Is this a jersey?” to “I think this is a jersey!”
Here is where we full out let the fans know that a new uniform was coming. We took old tweets from fans and our Senior Manager of Digital Media, Tania Henao, made this awesome graphic featuring Bradley Beal. We knew we wanted to use Brad for this because our following content was really heavy on Kyle Kuzma and we wanted to make sure this release was about the team and not one particular guy.
Next I wanted to make sure we were connecting why cherry blossoms are the theme of our uniform. As someone who is not from the D.C. area I really didn’t know much about them other than that there were lots of them in the city. Telling this story on social to our audience was important to me because we have millions of followers and obviously not all of them are going to be from D.C. or know about cherry blossoms.
And then our friends with the Nationals followed up as people really started to pick up on what we were doing. Dan Armelli and the group over there were incredibly helpful and great to work with.
For our reveal video it was important for us to showcase the city. This is the City Edition uniform and so making it connect was big. We had the cherry blossom petals float through the city which allowed us to showcase the beauty of D.C. and build more of a connection with our audience. The video closes on Kyle Kuzma at the Japanese Embassy wearing the jersey underneath a cherry blossom themed suit. Our friends at the Japanese Embassy have worked with the organization a lot in the past given our connection with Rui Hachimura and so for this shoot it made sense to showcase their decor given that cherry blossoms originated in Japan.
The tweet below garnered 1.28 MILLION impressions. We knew people would be excited but for me personally I did not expect these to go over this well. The fact that the cherry blossom trees were in bloom and so it was top of mind for people in the city probably helped, but clearly the love for these extended beyond the DMV area.
On Instagram we did what was essentially the same post as Twitter but we collaborated with Kyle Kuzma’s account. I worked closely with his manager to let him know what photos we were using, the copy and the timing. Kuz’s 5 million followers gave us even more eyeballs on our content and we continued to see the love pour in for these uniforms.