Description:

Christmas, a season of love and giving, often becomes a time of excess consumption and waste. In the western world, we spend lavishly on decorations, food, and gifts, with much ending up discarded. With billions spent on unwanted gifts and countless toys broken or discarded by spring, the need to rethink our Christmas habits is clear.

In recent years the cost of Christmas has put people under pressure, with inflation squeezing household budgets and ecological systems strained by human exploitation, it was evident that Christmas needed fixing!

We needed to create a behavioural shift to take the holiday focus from consumption to regeneration, to target the environmentally conscious consumers during the festive season, with an aim to encourage people to embrace repair as a gift-giving alternative.

The challenge was to reshape social attitudes around holiday gift-giving, bridging the "effort gap" between the convenience of buying new and the perceived effort of repair. The goal was to demonstrate that acts of repair could be meaningful gifts of love, surpassing the value of easily bought items.

To do this, we created Fixmas, a festive-theme repair toolkit powered by Fixie, an AI chatbot designed to facilitate the step-by-step repair of almost any consumer product.

Fixmas is a revolutionary initiative aimed at transforming holiday gift-giving norms. By bridging the "effort gap" between buying new and repairing, we aim to show that acts of repair can be heartfelt gifts, surpassing the value of easily bought items.

The business case involved leveraging holiday gift guides and marketing tropes to capitalise on the holiday season's consumer mindset while challenging perceptions about gift-giving and sustainability.

Fixmas aimed to shift short-term consumer behaviour during the holiday season towards repair-oriented giving. Long term, the goal is to cultivate a lasting shift in consumer attitudes towards repair, promoting sustainability and reducing waste beyond the holiday period. A reactivation of Fixmas is planned for 2024, and we are collaborating with iFixit to improve their own repair experiences.

The Fixmas campaign received a positive response from our target audience, with over 4000 unique visitors to Fixmas.com during the campaign period (December – January). Additionally, a supporting film gained significant traction online, inspiring a 'Fixmas workshop' in Denmark and sparking interest from global partners to continue the campaign in 2024.