Case Study: SBD Apparel – The Making of Phantom
It isn’t just what you shoot—it’s where you shoot it.
It isn’t just what you shoot—it’s where you shoot it.
For niche powerlifting brand SBD Apparel, launching a new product wasn’t just about design innovation—it was about gaining cultural traction. In a category built on strength but short on storytelling, we needed more than a product film. We needed a moment.
Enter The Making of Phantom.
At face value, it was a high-spec studio shoot to launch a new line of premium weightlifting gear. But the real strategy lived upstream. We chose to shoot in New York—not because we had to, but because the location itself was part of the message.
The athletes featured—Big Z, Jess Bittner, and American powerlifting sensation Kimberly Walford—weren’t just talent. They were distribution. By flying them in and filming behind the scenes at Red Hook’s legendary studio (favoured by the likes of Cardi B, Vogue, and Annie Leibovitz), we gave them something to talk about before the campaign even launched.
Their posts became our teaser. Their hype, our earned reach. The location added aspiration. The logistics added scale. The Instagram stories, reels, and BTS clips added heat.
The production itself was precision: monochromatic studio lighting, high-contrast detail, zero gimmicks. Shot in a stylised black-box environment, the creative mirrored the product—clean, disciplined, powerful. We captured signature product movements: lifts, holds, resistance. This was gear built for performance, not pose.
But the genius of the campaign lay in how the pre-launch buzz became the first wave of attention. While the final film landed with impact, it was the pre-rollout, driven by athlete channels, that got people asking: what is Phantom?
From a behavioural strategy perspective, we leveraged earned anticipation, social currency, and in-group signalling. For powerlifters, seeing top-tier athletes flown to NYC for a mystery shoot created intrigue, authority, and FOMO in one hit.
Results:
3.9x increase in social engagement for SBD in the three weeks leading to launch
62% of traffic to product pages during launch week attributed to athlete-referred sources
Phantom became SBD’s fastest-selling product drop to date
Marked brand’s highest uplift in unaided awareness in international powerlifting communities
BTS content from NYC shared and reshared by athletes, coaches, and federations globally
Why it worked:
Because we didn’t just launch a product—we staged a story. The Making of Phantom made the production part of the performance. And in doing so, it turned a niche brand moment into something the whole community wanted to see.