Need to Know
17 : 10 : 19

By Livvy Houghton, Holly Friend and Kathryn Bishop

Cigna’s colourful visuals make stress tangible, Hayman’s gin is driving a British rum renaissance, and print advertising loses out to social media.

In today's news:

Everlane gives cashmere a second life

These visualisations let you ‘see’ stress

Hayman’s spotlights the history of British rum

Stat: Social media ad spend forecast to eclipse print

Everlane gives cashmere a second life

ReCashmere by Everlane

US – The ReCashmere collection will halve the carbon footprint of traditional sweaters.

To create the collection, Everlane teamed up with a local mill in Prato, Italy, which specialises in upcycling cashmere wool. The mill collects worn sweaters through a recycling scheme, then – likened to painters mixing pigments – it chooses different colours to comb into new yarns. Finally, they blend them with extra-fine merino wool to create cashmere with a 50% smaller carbon footprint.

The mill has also assessed the lifecycle of ReCashmere to measure the environmental impact of a sweater’s life, from manufacturing and repairs to recycling. Recently, cashmere producers have struggled with increasing global demand, which has had a damaging effect on grasslands and goat herds in Mongolia.

To see how fashion brands around the world are innovating to give garments a second life and decrease their impact on the planet, explore our Fashion sector.

These visualisations let you ‘see’ stress

See Stress Differently, Cigna Insurance Middle East

UAE – Health services company Cigna Insurance has launched a new campaign to help people living in the Middle East better understand the long-term impact of stress.

The Stress Care initiative encourages citizens to ‘see stress differently’. To bring physiological responses to life, Cigna partnered with visual artist Sean Sullivan to create a series of stress portraits – colourful graphics that represent live readings of a person’s brainwaves, heart rate and skin response.

Warmer colours, such as red and orange, suggest a high level of stress, while cooler colours, such as blue, indicate a lower level. The intensity of stress is also captured in the speed at which relating animations move, with a high-stress visualisation moving rapidly. While not a medical or diagnostic tool, the graphics aim to help people living in the UAE understand stress and take proactive steps to reduce it.

As stress impacts individuals in different ways, Sullivan’s visuals helps to demystify experiences by communicating bodily responses as visible and tangible. For more on data visualisation, explore our Digital Dialogues design direction.

Hayman’s spotlights the history of British rum

London – The gin producer has launched Charles Merser & Co, the first rum blending house in London for more than a century.

The new rum brand launches its first product, Merser’s Double Barrel, in October and represents a fresh era for the heritage gin distillery. Charles Merser & Co will source, blend, marry and bottle mature Caribbean rums to create new tastes ‘distilled in the Caribbean but very much made in London’.

James Hayman, co-owner of the distillery, says that his family was once involved in London’s rum trade and sourced liquid from West India Docks to create its own proprietary blends over 100 years ago. ‘Over recent years, people have come to understand the important role that gin has played in London’s social history but rum’s story remains untold,’ says Jonathan Gibson, brand director. ‘With Merser’s we aim to explore that history, to bring back those lost traditions and to encourage a renaissance of interest in London rum.’

By expanding into rum in an oversaturated gin market, Hayman’s is highlighting London’s overlooked social history while also challenging the meaning of provenance.

Charles Merser & Co

Stat: Social media ad spend forecast to eclipse print

Media agency Zenith is forecasting that advertising spend on social media with overtake print publications worldwide for the first time in 2019.

According to its recent Advertising Expenditure Forecast, ad spending on social media will jump 20% to a figure of $84 billion (£66bn, €76bn) in 2019, to account for a total 13% share of advertising spend globally. Social media could therefore become the third-largest advertising channel in terms of spend, after television (29%) and paid search (17%).

Meanwhile, combined magazine and newspaper spending is forecast to fall 6% to $69 billion (£54bn, €62bn), symptomatic of the growth in people using social media streams as their main source of news and essential cultural information.

For brands, social media is a burgeoning shop window where products can be discovered, shared and purchased instantly. As social commerce continues to grow, new technologies and in-platform advertising features are transforming the way consumers discover products. Dive into the Shoppable Social Market for key case studies.