Joe Fresh is championing diversity

When Joe Fresh Art Direction Lead Talle Tian began thinking about the brand’s spring activewear campaign—which landed in stores in early 2023 and features a diverse range of models, including athlete Allison Lang, who wears a prosthetic leg—she wanted to do something a little bit different than the typical ‘new year, new you’ approach.  

"A lot of our customers who are buying our activewear might not necessarily be really the same customers who would typically go to other brands for high performance activewear,” she says. “I think most people that buy activewear with us are people who just want to have good-quality, affordable, cute workout clothes to move and feel good in. So our campaign was really speaking to that person in particular.” 

After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, physical and mental well-being were top-of-mind, not just for shoppers, but for herself and her team.    

“The theme of the collection is about feeling good and moving happy in your activewear, so we wanted the message of self-love and self-care to come through in this campaign,” she says.   

The decision to feature models with different body types, including racialized models, a plus-sized model and someone with a disability, came at the very beginning of the creative process. DEI was top of mind from the start and throughout the campaign concept process. When Talle and her team looked at their inspiration boards, they noticed a lot of bright, punchy colours, which reminded them of the 80s and 90s. There’s currently a huge retro revival happening right now, she notes, and this felt like a good way for the Joe Fresh team to tap into that zeitgeist.   

“I think everyone associates Joe Fresh as a very happy and accessible brand. So, once we understood that we wanted this campaign to feel happy and full of life, we knew we had to stay true to that not just in the language we used in the campaign, but also in our casting,” she says.  

This approach wasn’t just important for Talle personally. It’s also part of Loblaw’s overall commitment to delivering on its purpose – helping Canadians Live Life Well® 

 – throughout all aspects of its strategy and operating practices. This commitment is something that the company strives to be recognized for, whether that’s by customers or by the industry at large. That’s what made the company’s win of the 2023 Canadian Grocer Impact Award, in the DEI category, so meaningful. 

“We know that representation is really important in every sense of the word, whether it be size, race, colour, gender, etc.,” Talle says. “Especially because we are such a large company with stores all across the country. I think it's really important to focus on diversity, and do it in a meaningful way, because we can impact the way our brands cast in the future. And, every time we've ever taken a step towards casting that's a little bit outside of our typical norm, our audiences and our customers have always responded really positively.”