HarrimanSteel has unveiled Reside Courageously, a brand new model movie and built-in marketing campaign for Shackleton that reframes the explorer’s century-old writing as a message for contemporary occasions. The undertaking asks a deceptively easy query: how do you make a heritage model rooted in polar expeditions resonate with individuals navigating a world of uncertainty, distraction and fixed noise?
Jess Grunow, graphic designer at HarrimanSteel, explains how the start line was a line from Sir Ernest Shackleton himself: “Difficulties are simply issues to beat, in spite of everything.” It is considered one of many extracts from his journals and letters which have been woven collectively into the movie’s monologue. Although written between 1909 and 1922, the phrases really feel strikingly present.
She says: “A century in the past, Shackleton confronted the unknown with a compass of braveness, resilience and ethical fortitude. Right this moment, those self same qualities really feel extra important than ever.”
Slightly than positioning braveness because the protect of explorers or elite adventurers, the marketing campaign broadens the lens. HarrimanSteel’s transient was to develop a model anthem that defines what “Residing Courageously” means in 2025.
To be able to obtain this, the movie mixes Shackleton’s voice with a collage of up to date visuals, from frontline footage and exhausting realities to on a regular basis resistance and the quieter acts of integrity that hardly ever make headlines. Taken collectively, they serve to remind the viewer that braveness is not solely present in extremes.
The crew additionally repurposed Shackleton’s authentic writing, displaying his phrases alongside discovered stills and sourced footage to create a dialogue between previous and current, illustrating how ethical fortitude and resilience stay as related now as they had been throughout the heroic age of exploration. The writer’s reveal comes solely on the finish of the movie, prompting viewers to rethink their assumptions about management and conviction.
Throughout the imagery, HarrimanSteel intentionally highlights what it calls the “braveness, conviction and contradictions” shaping immediately’s world. This can be a movie that does not shrink back from complexity, contrasting moments of bravery with scenes that trace at its absence. There isn’t any shiny triumphalism right here; as an alternative, it acknowledges the exhausting graft of staying principled when the trail of least resistance is way simpler.
“We held a mirror as much as the fashionable world to remind those who braveness, resilience and ethical fortitude are simply as important immediately as they had been 100 years in the past,” Jess says.
To deliver the concept into the actual world, HarrimanSteel collaborated with photographer Steve Harries to create a sequence of portraits that includes three people who embody Shackleton’s ethos: explorer Levison Wooden, author and filmmaker Ash Bhardwaj, and world-record-breaking athlete Max Thorpe.
None are fashions recruited for the shoot; every has lived the qualities the model desires to rejoice. Their portraits will type the spine of the upcoming print marketing campaign, which is about to roll out throughout press, retail and OOH.
The undertaking additionally coincides with the launch of three new Shackleton jackets, together with the Titan, its most excessive piece of outerwear up to now. Whereas product messaging sits firmly within the wider marketing campaign, Reside Courageously is framed as one thing broader than efficiency gear. It is concerning the mindset behind the model: a perception that braveness is a each day apply, not an occasional grand gesture.
The movie’s closing sentiment, lifted from Shackleton’s personal writing, encapsulates that spirit: “By endurance, we conquer. Onward”. It is a neat summation of a marketing campaign spanning a century, connecting an explorer’s steadfast optimism with a up to date name to motion.
Jess displays on that through-line: “We needed to focus on that braveness is not simply discovered on the poles or on the peaks. It is present in on a regular basis acts of integrity, in standing agency for what issues, and in dealing with no matter storms life brings.”
With the print marketing campaign quickly to observe, HarrimanSteel and Shackleton aren’t completed but, however as model rallying cries go, Reside Courageously looks like one with actual weight.
