Starbucks + Wicked

“Together we’re unlimited”
- Elphaba, Wicked

Starbucks partnered with NBC Universal for an exclusive moment of surprise and delight that taps into the excitement surrounding the highly-anticipated release of the movie Wicked.

Campaign CreativE

A small sample of the Emerald City themed art provided by NBC Universal.

The goal was to establish how the Wicked movie property could genuinely, authentically, and stylistically be translated to fit the Starbucks brand.

We worked closely with the team at NBC Universal to leverage their library of pre-existing creative assets of designs, patterns, and color palettes created for the movie. We focused our work on utilizing art from their “Emerald City” collection (example above). The Emerald City art felt the closest to the Starbucks brand with its use of rich greens and geometric, Art Deco pattern-work. It also gave us the opportunity to highlight Seattle as the Emerald City, as it is often coined.

With our work grounded in the Emerald City theme, the team and I worked to develop a mood board that would set the tone for how we build out the overall look and feel of the Starbucks + Wicked partnership.

Moodboard & Toolkit

This mood board/toolkit acts as a “north-star” for guidance and reference for building out brand assets for this collaboration across multiple global channels and touch points.

We championed the use of green as a hero element as a way to ground the work in both partnership spaces.
Introduced single gold icons pulled from the NBC Universal original art patterns, like the sparkles, hot air balloon, and butterfly, to be used as small surprise and delight, and IYKYK pieces.
We also carried over some of the Art Deco themes, with elements like arches, gold sunbursts and gold rounded borders, as well as expressive geometric line-work patterns.
The archway frame element was to be used to showcase a product or item, as though being viewed through a window or a door, inviting you into a magical realm.
Single color clouds act as a added graphic element, that brings mystery and drama to these scenes, but also act as a slight nod and a wink to the two main characters.