How Eastpak Built to Resist 24 Champions Cosplay and LARP Culture
Eastpak's Built to Resist 24 is a 2024 global brand campaign that celebrates cosplay and live action role play communities as symbols of creativity, individuality, and defiance against conformity, distributed across social and digital channels in more than 24 countries across multinational Europe and beyond.
Launched on February 29, 2024, the campaign extends the brand's longstanding Built to Resist platform into new cultural territory. Where previous iterations leaned on durability and adventure — including the 2023 edition, which set its narrative on a speculative Mars landscape, as reported by adobomagazine.com — Built to Resist 24 anchors its message in a more immediate and visible subculture. The campaign's central film runs at nearly 90 seconds and follows cosplayers in the moments after a cosplay convention, capturing the lived experience of transformation and self-expression that defines those communities.
The campaign operates across the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden, among other markets, as documented by News Designrush and Pub Be. Its reach across multinational Europe reflects Eastpak's positioning as a pan-European lifestyle brand with deep roots in youth culture. The Built to Resist platform, retained continuously with independent creative agency Mutant, functions as both a product promise and a cultural declaration — one that the 2024 edition directs squarely at communities that resist the mundane through imagination, craft, and collective identity. Pete Winkworth, Global Marketing Director at Eastpak, frames the brand's position clearly: those who don't accept the status quo are precisely the people Eastpak aligns with, and the cosplay and LARP communities embody that ethos at their core.
Eastpak operates in a competitive global backpack and lifestyle accessories market. According to thebusinessresearchcompany.com, the global backpack market was valued at approximately 20.69 billion US dollars in 2024, with sustained growth projected across the forecast period. In multinational Europe, where Eastpak has its strongest retail and brand presence, the category is contested by major players including The North Face and Samsonite, both of which hold estimated market share in the global backpack and lifestyle segment, according to marketresearchfuture.com. Against that backdrop, Eastpak's decision to anchor Built to Resist 24 in cosplay and LARP culture represents a deliberate move to own a values-based position rather than compete on product specification alone.
The strategic rationale is grounded in a clear consumer insight. Tabletop role-playing, escapist fantasy literature, cosplay, and live action role play have moved from niche subcultures into mainstream youth culture across Europe and beyond. These communities are defined by exactly the qualities that Eastpak's Built to Resist platform has always championed — resilience, self-expression, and a refusal to be defined by convention. By aligning the brand with cosplay and LARP, Mutant and Eastpak identify a community whose values and rituals mirror the brand's own history. As Odin Saillé, Founder and Chief Creative at Mutant, observed, the parallel between a teenager customising their Eastpak bag with markers, safety pins, and patches and a cosplayer assembling a new character's wardrobe is not incidental — it is the strategic spine of the entire campaign.
Across multinational Europe, where youth identity and subcultural participation are increasingly visible in mainstream media and retail, this approach positions Eastpak as a brand that sees its audience rather than simply targets them. The campaign's primary distribution through social and digital channels, as confirmed by news.designrush.com, further aligns the media strategy with the platforms where cosplay and LARP communities are most active and most vocal.
Guy de la Palme directs the nearly 90-second short film at the centre of Built to Resist 24, working through production company Caviar Brussels, as documented by mutant.agency. The film's creative premise is specific and deliberate: rather than depicting cosplay as spectacle or novelty, it portrays cosplayers in the candid, in-between moments after a convention — on public transport, in corridors, moving through ordinary urban space while still in full costume and character.
This framing is where the campaign's creative intelligence resides. By placing cosplayers in the mundane environments they are precisely not meant to inhabit, the film creates a visual and emotional tension that does the strategic work without requiring a single line of dialogue to explain it. The contrast between the extraordinary — the elaborate costumes, the fully realised fantasy personas — and the ordinary — the fluorescent lighting, the everyday commute — dramatises the Built to Resist message with economy and wit. The cosplayers are not presented as outsiders to be marvelled at; they are presented as people who have chosen to bring colour and identity into spaces that would otherwise erase both.
Odin Saillé, Founder and Chief Creative at Mutant, drew a direct line between the cosplay ritual of assembling an identity through costume and the teenage ritual of customising an Eastpak bag — both acts of self-expression, both forms of resistance to a world that prefers conformity. That conceptual thread runs through every creative decision in the film, from casting to colour palette to the choice of real cosplay community members rather than actors performing the role. Production credits beyond the director and agency are not fully documented in public sources, though mutant.agency confirms the Caviar Brussels production partnership. The campaign's visual identity, distributed across social and digital channels in more than 24 markets across multinational Europe, was built to travel — legible and resonant across cultural contexts without losing specificity.
No independently verified performance data — including reach figures, engagement rates, or sales attribution — for Built to Resist 24 is publicly available at the time of publication. The campaign's impact is therefore assessed on structural and strategic grounds rather than reported metrics.
Eastpak's Built to Resist 24 earns a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that demonstrates clear strategic coherence and a well-executed creative idea, while leaving room for deeper cultural integration and measurable community engagement. The decision to ground the Built to Resist platform in cosplay and LARP culture is structurally sound: the insight is genuine, the parallel between bag customisation and costume assembly is original, and the film's creative execution — placing cosplayers in deliberately mundane environments across multinational Europe — generates tension that works in the brand's favour without overstating the case.
The campaign's distribution across more than 24 countries, as reported by news.designrush.com and pub.be, gives it meaningful scale across the European markets where Eastpak holds its strongest brand equity. The continuity of both the Built to Resist platform and the Mutant agency partnership — sustained from the 2023 Mars-themed campaign through to the 2024 cosplay and LARP edition, as noted by Reason Why and adobomagazine.com — signals a brand operating with strategic patience rather than chasing short-term trend cycles. Where the campaign's structural score is moderated is in the degree to which it converts cultural alignment into measurable community action — a dimension that social and digital distribution alone does not guarantee.
Built to Resist 24 is Eastpak's 2024 global brand campaign celebrating cosplay and live action role play communities. Created by independent agency Mutant and directed by Guy de la Palme, the nearly 90-second film follows cosplayers after a convention, championing self-expression, individuality, and resistance to conformity across more than 24 markets in multinational Europe.
Independent creative agency Mutant created Built to Resist 24 for Eastpak. Odin Saillé, Founder and Chief Creative at Mutant, led the creative direction. The campaign film was directed by Guy de la Palme through Caviar Brussels. Pete Winkworth, Global Marketing Director at Eastpak, served as the brand's senior marketing lead on the project.
Eastpak chose cosplay and LARP because both communities embody resilience and self-expression — the same values at the core of its Built to Resist platform. Mutant identified a direct parallel between cosplayers assembling identities through costume and teenagers customising Eastpak bags, making the communities a natural and authentic fit for the brand's message.
Built to Resist 24 ran across more than 24 countries in multinational Europe, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden, according to news.designrush.com and pub.be. The campaign was distributed primarily through social and digital channels across all markets.
Eastpak's Built to Resist 24 received a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100. The score reflects strong strategic coherence and a well-grounded creative idea rooted in cosplay and LARP culture, moderated by limited publicly available evidence of measurable community engagement or independently verified campaign performance data across its European markets.
Built to Resist 24 continues a platform Eastpak has sustained across multiple years with agency Mutant. The 2023 edition used a speculative Mars setting to dramatise durability, as reported by adobomagazine.com. The 2024 edition shifts the lens to cosplay and LARP communities, retaining the same core message of resilience and self-expression while updating its cultural reference point.
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