Dr. Stretch is a Japanese based company that provides professional body stretching techniques to increase recovery and maintenance of core strength. Developed in the U.S and used at Major League Baseball teams for the Boston Red Socks, it improves performance and is now commercially available. The task was to launch the franchise in Singapore at key retail malls with a very limited budget.

With a very limited budget we had to activate the best assets we had on offer. We focused on their store front in Suntec City as a cost effective engagement strategy supported by an online social campaign. This allowed us to directly engage with foot traffic, deliver tactical offers and most importantly build the brand.

While established in the Japanese market, Dr. Stretch is an unknown in Singapore. We needed to inform the consumers that Dr. Stretch was not a massage parlour. It’s a medicinal sports recovery system. We needed to differentiate the product from the thousands of Singaporean massage parlours. They specifically targets muscle groups to improve the athletes muscle conditions and performance through stretching.

With this in mind we knew consumers are apathetic to images of practitioners in massage poses. The visual vernacular of the clichéd massage table and relaxed consumer would send the wrong message. Dr. Stretch needed to be more medically focused. Unfortunately that raises a new challenge. Medical images are very dry and boring.

It needed a twist.

We created an arresting campaign in a visually crowded retail market by physically creating muscular structures out of real rubber bands. A striking visual metaphor that instantly delivers on the product benefit of a medicinal practice that literally stretches your muscles to rubber band elasticity increasing performance.

To achieve the perfect anatomical structure of the human body, we hired a model maker who spent days moulding and hot gluing single strands of rubber bands to create the final muscle sculpture.

Without the need for much photographic retouching, these muscle sculptures, under the dramatic studio lighting, captured a life-like anatomy. The only fine-tuning was adjustment the colour and removal of a few glue marks. In a world where overly retouched and completely 3D images are created to bring an idea to life, this was a refreshing approach to achieving our goal with straight photography.

The posters we’re installed in the stores and instantly gained attention. We coupled this with brochures and social content posts using the same imagery to directly engage potential customers and create sign-ups.

Over the promotional period, Dr. Stretch successfully launched their flagship store and exceeded sales targets.

The campaign helped exceed projected customer bookings by 150% for two consecutive months. Dr Stretch have since continued to hire more staff and opened extra stores in Serangoon and Paya Lebar.