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Leroy Merlin Sails Home Into Emotional Territory With Life's Adventure
Leroy Merlin's "Life's Adventure" is a 2017 French retail film, created by BETC Shopper, in which a fully furnished house sails across open water as a metaphor for home improvement and the shared journey of building a life together.
The campaign launched in France in March 2017, with Adweek reporting its release on March 21 and The Drum covering it on March 24 of that year. Produced as a single film asset, it represents a deliberate strategic departure for the brand. Leroy Merlin, one of France's most recognised home-improvement retailers, had long been associated with the DIY category — a positioning that BETC Shopper was briefed to move beyond. As Carole Penillard, associate director at BETC Shopper, confirmed to Adweek, the objective was to reposition Leroy Merlin from a DIY store to a brand dedicated to home-improvement projects in the fullest sense of that phrase.
In France, where home ownership and domestic identity carry deep cultural weight, that repositioning had genuine resonance. The campaign does not lead with product, price, or category convenience. Instead, it reaches for something more universal — the idea that improving a home is inseparable from improving a life. The house-as-vessel image serves as the organising metaphor throughout, transforming what might otherwise have been a conventional retail commercial into a piece of cinematic storytelling. Clapboard, which archives the campaign as part of its global advertising intelligence platform, assigns "Life's Adventure" a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and production craft within the retail category.
BETC Shopper's brief for Leroy Merlin centred on a single strategic pivot. The agency was tasked with moving the brand away from a transactional, task-oriented DIY identity and toward an emotional platform rooted in the idea of building a home as building a life. This is a meaningful distinction in the French retail context, where competitors including Castorama and Mr. Bricolage have historically competed on product range, price, and project utility — leaving the emotional territory largely unclaimed.
The strategic rationale draws on a consumer insight that home-improvement decisions are rarely purely functional. In France, where the domestic sphere carries significant cultural and social meaning, the act of renovating or furnishing a home is bound up with aspiration, partnership, and personal identity. BETC Shopper, operating as the shopper-marketing arm of the wider BETC Paris network, leveraged this insight to argue that Leroy Merlin's most defensible position was not as the most convenient DIY destination but as the brand most aligned with what people are actually trying to build. Strategic planning for the campaign was led by Étienne Delaharpe, according to production documentation cited by thecreativesroom.com.
According to GlobalData, the global retail home-improvement and gardening-products market grew at a compound annual growth rate of 4.2% between 2017 and 2021, a period of sustained category expansion that made brand differentiation increasingly important. In France specifically, the home-improvement sector was navigating the tension between growing consumer confidence in DIY projects and a simultaneous desire for more curated, lifestyle-oriented brand relationships. "Life's Adventure" was designed to resolve that tension in Leroy Merlin's favour.
Reynald Gresset directed "Life's Adventure" for production company La Pac. The film's central image — a complete, furnished house sailing across a body of water — required a production approach of considerable complexity and physical ambition, executed over a seven-day shoot in South Africa, as documented by thecreativesroom.com and Reason Why.
Each key scene was filmed three times: once on dry land, once on a moving set, and once on water. That tripartite production methodology ensured the visual continuity required to make the conceit believable and to maintain the emotional register of the narrative across every frame. The production deployed divers, drones, and helicopters to capture the full scope of the imagery, according to production records cited by thecreativesroom.com. The result is a film whose craft is inseparable from its meaning — the difficulty of the production mirrors the weight of the metaphor it is built to carry.
The broader creative team at BETC Shopper included Chief Creative Officer Stéphane Xiberras, Executive Creative Director Olivier Apers, Art Director Viken Guzel, and Copywriter Jean-Marie Gateau, as documented by dailycommercials.com and betc.com. Agency Producer David Green oversaw production logistics, and music supervision was handled by Christophe Caurret, whose role as Music Creative Director shaped the emotional texture of the final cut. Producer Jérôme Denis at La Pac managed on-the-ground execution, according to thecreativesroom.com. Adweek, in its March 2017 coverage, characterised the film as "lovely" and drew comparisons to the imaginative worlds of Pixar's Up and Ang Lee's Life of Pi — a framing that speaks directly to the ambition of both the direction and the overall creative concept. In France, a market where television and digital film remain primary vehicles for retail brand-building, the production scale of "Life's Adventure" positioned it as an outlier in its category.
No independently verified post-campaign performance data for "Life's Adventure" — such as television ratings, digital view counts, or attributed sales uplift — is publicly available at the time of writing. What the public record does confirm is the breadth of trade-press attention the film received at launch. Both Adweek and The Drum covered the campaign within days of its March 2017 release in France, a level of editorial response that is unusual for a retail home-improvement film and speaks to the campaign's perceived creative significance within the industry.
Structurally, "Life's Adventure" exhibits the characteristics associated with effective emotional brand campaigns in the retail sector. Its narrative is singular and visually distinctive, reducing the risk of category confusion. Its metaphor — a home that sails — is ownable and difficult to replicate without direct imitation. And its strategic objective, repositioning Leroy Merlin from a functional DIY retailer to a brand about life-building, is clearly encoded in the creative execution rather than stated didactically. These qualities suggest a film built for both immediate attention and longer-term brand equity accumulation.
According to GlobalData, the home-improvement retail category sustained a 4.2% compound annual growth rate globally from 2017 to 2021, meaning the competitive pressure on French retailers to differentiate on brand values — rather than product alone — was already rising at the time of the campaign's release. Within that context, the decision to invest in a production of this scale and emotional register reflects a considered strategic bet. Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 71 out of 100, recognising its craft and strategic clarity while noting the absence of verified audience metrics.
"Life's Adventure" is a 2017 French retail film created by BETC Shopper for Leroy Merlin. It depicts a furnished house sailing across open water as a metaphor for home improvement and life-building. The campaign launched in March 2017 and received coverage from both Adweek and The Drum upon release.
BETC Shopper, the shopper-marketing division of BETC Paris, created "Life's Adventure" for Leroy Merlin. The creative team included Chief Creative Officer Stéphane Xiberras, Executive Creative Director Olivier Apers, Art Director Viken Guzel, and Copywriter Jean-Marie Gateau, as documented by betc.com and dailycommercials.com.
Reynald Gresset directed "Life's Adventure" for production company La Pac. The film was shot over seven days in South Africa, with each key scene filmed three times — on dry land, on a moving set, and on water — according to records cited by thecreativesroom.com and reasonwhy.es.
BETC Shopper was briefed to reposition Leroy Merlin from a DIY retailer toward a brand dedicated to home-improvement projects. As Carole Penillard of BETC Shopper confirmed to Adweek, the goal was to shift the brand's identity in France from transactional utility to emotional life-building territory, differentiating it from competitors including Castorama.
Adweek, in its March 21, 2017 coverage, characterised "Life's Adventure" as "lovely" and compared its imaginative quality to the films Up and Life of Pi. That editorial framing underlines the campaign's ambition to operate beyond conventional French retail advertising norms and occupy cinematic storytelling territory.
Clapboard assigns "Life's Adventure" a score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative ambition, distinctive visual metaphor, and considered production craft within the French retail and house-and-garden category, while acknowledging that no independently verified audience performance metrics are publicly available for the film.
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