Creative Corner: Duolingo's Phonetic Collection, Mastercard's Payeux Tapestry and IKEA's Swedish Test

This week in the Creative Corner, it is Fanclub's Emily Barnes who is keen on Duolingo's move into fashion, Mastercard's own tapestry, and IKEA awarding points for pronunciation.

There's a particular kind of chaos to early September and its signalling of fresh starts and new beginnings.

It’s rich territory for brands scrambling to say something that cuts through it all. This past week, three of them skipped that scramble entirely by being a bit introspective and elevating a funny name, an old habit, and an awkward stat, and putting it right in the shop window instead.

Duolingo dresses up fashion week's biggest inside joke

Fashion has always had a pronunciation problem, and Duolingo, as the de facto fact-checker for how anything is supposed to sound, has decided to make it the brand's problem to solve. 

Timed to New York Fashion Week, the app has launched The Phonetic Collection, a seven-piece capsule collection made with designer Megan O'Cain (of Next in Fashion), spelling out how to actually say the names people mangle the most.

Duolingo's own research with YouGov found that 62% of Americans think they can pronounce ‘Hermès’ confidently, but only 15% actually get it right, and Jacquemus came out as the name Americans feel least sure about saying at all. Rather than just publishing the stat, the brand turned it into block-lettered phonetic spellings across tailoring, sportswear and accessories, with O'Cain given real creative latitude to make the pieces feel like fashion first and insight second.

An OOH campaign on Canal Street, a two-day pop-up at Null Object, and a mechanic where a strong Duolingo streak gets you the chance to take a piece home- a nice, integrated CTA. It's a really smart bit of category hijacking; borrowing fashion's own insecurity and turning it into the entire creative.

Mastercard weaves 3,000 years of shopping into a giant tapestry

Coinciding with the (actual) Bayeux Tapestry going on display at the British Museum for the first time in England in nearly a thousand years, Mastercard has unveiled its own version: a ten-metre woven history of money, running from cowrie shells in 1,200 BCE through to a prediction of robots doing the weekly shop by 2030.

Fifteen scenes, each drawn by a different child, were woven by hand onto a Jacquard loom over 200 hours and roughly 35,000 passes, under the direction of Mia Hansson, a textile artist who has spent close to a decade building her own full-scale replica of the original Bayeux Tapestry. 

The first ten scenes track real history: coins, cheques, contactless. The final five imagine the next five years, including AI agents managing a household budget and machine-to-machine payments letting an electric car pay for its own charge.

Literally stitching it into the same format used to record the Norman Conquest gives the idea scale and history that it wouldn't otherwise earn. It’s a refreshing example of a fintech brand's marketing being news-y and relevant to a calendar hook that makes sense.

IKEA turns its product names into the final exam

IKEA's Swedish names have been a beloved bit of brand theatre for decades—half the joy of a trip there is trying to say them out loud. So, working with Ogilvy Amsterdam, IKEA UAE has turned it into a back-to-school TikTok game called The Swedish Test, which is built on the same pronunciation filter format that's already popular on the app.

The mechanic is simple: players attempt product names starting easy (LACK, BILLY) and ramping up to genuinely difficult Swedish words like ÖRFJÄLL and BJÖRKSNÄS, scored in real time, with strong attempts earning a shot at an IKEA gift card redeemable in store. This is a regional push out of the UAE, not a global rollout, though the format is exactly the sort of thing that travels well when it lands.

There's a nice bit of brand history underneath the joke, too. IKEA's Swedish naming system reportedly began because founder Ingvar Kamprad, who had dyslexia, found names easier to work with than product codes. Decades on, it has become one of the most recognisable things about the company, and, as ever, IKEA is letting everyone in on the joke. According to Ogilvy's creative directors, the average person is now spending over two minutes engaging with the brand through the format, a genuinely strong stat for something built on nothing more than a funny word and a phone camera!

That's it for this week's Creative Corner!

If you’ve seen something that caught your eye, or if you’ve been working on something you’re particularly proud of, please get in touch at emily.barnes@fanclubpr.com. 

I’d love to hear about it.