Well.ca is using a visual metaphor of a blooming garden to show how its selection of wellness products have a long-term effect in brightening daily life.

The ecommerce retailer’s “Let Wellness In” is the first brand-focused marketing effort and its largest ever investment. It is based around a 30-second spot with an expectant mother and a baby moving through their home, where flora exploding into bloom, covering walls and floors.

According to Meghan Kraemer, partner and CD at Hard Work Club, which created the campaign, it was initially inspired by the brand’s tulip logo, and drawing a conceptual parallel between a blossoming relationship between mother and child, and that of a garden growing.

The campaign’s tagline, “let wellness in,” is about the fact that wellness is not one act, but about taking little steps everyday towards self-care. It also amplifies messaging customers encounter when moving through the buying process on the site, asking users about whether they’re on a “wellness journey.”

The challenge, Kraemer says, is that Well.ca has so many offerings, with everything from vitamins to skincare to baby products among the sites 40,000 curated products, so it was hard to zero in on any one thing. The blooming garden was appropriate not just because of the time of year, but because of the idea of rebirth and vitality applying across the kind of lifestyle Well.ca aims to helps its customers live.

The campaign debuted during the recent Academy Awards telecast and will be running through the end of April across TV and online video.

Hard Work Club won the Well.ca business as its AOR in December after an RFP process. When it initially began to work with the brand, a big cable TV spot wasn’t necessarily in the works, Kraemer explains, but the campaign got bigger over time to include both linear and specialty TV, including an Oscar’s media buy by Media Experts, the right demographic fit for adults 25 to 54 with a skew toward women. 

“This is bigger than anything they’ve done before…they want to make a push, and be more top of mind for Canadians,” Kraemer says.

Well.ca is based in Toronto and Guelph and is a wholly owned subsidiary of McKesson Canada, which is also the parent of Rexall. In 2018, it began allowing customers to choose to pick up their Well.ca order at 329 Rexall stores across the country with free shipping offered on orders of $35 or more.