How does a Lingerie brand come up with a memorable way to make its products stand out, especially when they’re selling something as basic as pink panties?

For Blush Lingerie, the family-owned Montreal company with a ton of European design signatures in its brand DNA, the answer was to create a whole new world — one bursting with colour, echoes of hip vintage style and a playful spirit.

The result was Pretty Little World, a pop-art dreamscape drenched in bright pastels and filled with oddball décor accents. Don’t be surprised if this marketing campaign inspires countless co-eds to redo their college dorm rooms this spring.

The Pretty Little World project was designed to promote Blush’s latest offerings in its Pretty Little Panties collection — an affordable assortment of silky microfiber and lace basics available in more than two dozen colour combos — and its mix-and-matchable Pretty Little Bralettes line. For Blush, which is better known for its elegant French-influenced lingerie styles, the Pretty Little collection gives it an important toehold in the booming market for soft, comfortable (but still fashionable) undies.

So how did the Pretty Little World come to life?

“The product itself, though very simple, is very quirky and playful,” Blush marketing director Tiffany Ajmo told Lingerie Talk. “The photoshoot had to reflect these traits, and so the scope was to create just that — a fun little world.”

Doing that meant revisiting 30-year-old design trends, a treasure hunt at a Goodwill store, and hours spent painting props such as a banana and a basketball.

Art director Lauren Radulescu drew inspiration from a 1980s design style called Memphis Milano, a trendsetting template of colour-blocked geometric shapes created by the Memphis Group of designers and architects in Milan. The theme is best known for its application in home décor and furniture, but it has proved enduringly popular among editorial and fashion stylists and it shows up occasionally in lingerie marketing (both Agent Provocateur and Eres have based recent campaigns on Memphis designs).

“The style is extremely fun and dynamic, but it had to be simplified, the product being an everyday staple, an essential in every woman’s lingerie collection,” Tiffany said.

The Blush team painted wood panels and photographers’ backdrops, then went shopping for props “with nothing very specific in mind.”

“Sometimes what you can find is better than what you can imagine,” Lauren added. “We grabbed everything colourful and fun that had an 80s vintage vibe.”

A trip to the local Goodwill store provided a bounty of objects waiting to be transformed — including a tiny wooden giraffe, a basketball and a vintage blue tennis racket. After visiting a grocery store, a melon received a new coat of baby blue paint, while a banana got a white coating that was decorated in doodles by hand.

The scavenger hunt demonstrated that you don’t need a big production budget to create an effective marketing campaign. But it also left the Blush team with a lot of options for outfitting the candy-coloured studio.

“The problem now was, how should we put it all together? It was honestly just trial and error,” Lauren said. “The key was to balance the right amount of quirk and pattern without over doing it. The first instinct was to always put in way more than we actually needed, so we just took away, little by little, until the perfect ratio was found.”

The results, as you can see below, are fresh, fun and surprisingly modern given all its vintage ingredients — the kind of catchy campaign that invites detailed inspection, starts conversations and lingers in the memory.

The only thing we’re unclear about … How did they get that model to float a foot above the floor?

Here’s the rest of Blush’s adorable Pretty Little World. Credits at the bottom. And you can learn more about the campaign and the collection that inspired it by visiting the brand’s informative blog, The Blush Social.

CREDITS: Photography, David Curleigh; MUAH, Paco Puertas; Models Desiree & Gabrielle C.