Nordgreen Turns Holiday Gifting Into a Meditation on Time
Nordgreen's "It's About Time" is a December 2018 digital holiday campaign published in Denmark that repositions a wristwatch not as a luxury object but as a symbol of life's most finite and meaningful resource: time itself.
The Copenhagen-based personal accessories brand launched the campaign during the peak of the Christmas gifting season, a period when competing watch and lifestyle brands lean heavily on product aesthetics, price promotions, and aspirational imagery. Nordgreen took the opposite approach. The campaign's central line — "It's not about the gifts we give, it's about the time we spend" — strips away the transactional logic of holiday advertising and replaces it with an emotional proposition rooted in human relationships rather than retail urgency.
In Denmark, where the brand was founded in 2017 by co-founders Pascar Sivam and Vasilij Brandt, according to records documented on the Ads of the World archive, "It's About Time" functions as a brand-building statement from a young company still establishing its voice in the fashion and apparel marketplace. The campaign comprises a single media asset delivered through digital channels, a deliberate restraint that concentrates creative energy into one precise, resonant message rather than dispersing it across a broad media mix.
The campaign sits within the personal accessories and lifestyle category, and its strategic positioning reflects the broader Nordgreen brand philosophy: that design-led Danish watchmaking carries meaning beyond the object itself. For a label only one year into its commercial life at the time of publication, "It's About Time" represents an early and confident articulation of what the brand stands for — not the mechanics of timekeeping, but the human weight of time passing.
Nordgreen entered the 2018 Christmas season as a challenger brand in a market defined by entrenched heritage names and an accelerating smartwatch category. The global watch market was estimated at approximately US$50.1 billion in 2018, according to data cited by Million Insights, with the luxury segment alone accounting for roughly US$6.9 billion, according to the same source. In Denmark and across international markets, Nordgreen faced pressure from two directions simultaneously: established Swiss watchmakers commanding premium shelf space and consumer trust, and the rapid growth of connected devices reshaping what a watch is expected to do.
Apple held approximately 75 percent of the smartwatch segment in 2018, according to figures referenced by Open PR, making the case for a purely aesthetic, time-honouring object harder to sustain on functional grounds alone. Swatch Group held approximately 28.6 percent of global watch sales that year, according to Watch PRO, and Swiss watch sales as a whole grew 6.3 percent in 2018, per the same source, demonstrating the resilience of the heritage sector. Nordgreen, founded just a year before this campaign ran, could not yet compete on heritage or scale.
The strategic insight behind "It's About Time" acknowledges this reality directly. Rather than attempting to out-feature a smartwatch or out-prestige a Swiss maison, the campaign appeals to a consumer truth that neither Apple nor Swatch Group typically addresses in holiday advertising: the desire to be present with the people who matter. In the Danish fashion and apparel market, where design minimalism and emotional authenticity carry cultural resonance, this reframing positions Nordgreen's wristwatch as a lifestyle choice that speaks to values rather than specifications. It is a brand-defining move more typical of a platform launch than a seasonal promotion — and in 2018, for a company barely twelve months old, that ambition is precisely the point.
"It's About Time" is built on deliberate economy. One media asset carries the entire weight of the campaign's argument, a formal decision that demands exceptional precision in every creative element from composition to copy. The creative team assembled for the campaign brought a range of disciplines to bear on that single output, and the credits documented on the Ads of the World listing reflect the breadth of craft involved.
Line Otto served as Creative Director, providing the strategic and aesthetic framework for the execution. Esther Günnewig took on the combined roles of Art Director, Illustrator, and Sound Designer — a rare triple-discipline credit that suggests the visual and sonic language of the piece were developed as an integrated whole rather than as separate deliverables. Jessica Knudsen wrote the copy, distilling the campaign's philosophical proposition into language simple enough to land instantly and resonant enough to remain. Anthony Rubinstein handled photography, bringing an external visual sensibility to the Copenhagen brand's aesthetic. Vasilij Brandt, one of Nordgreen's own co-founders, served as both Project Manager and Social Media Planner, bridging the founder's perspective with the campaign's distribution strategy. Christine Reil and Fiona Boller also held Project Manager credits, according to the Ads of the World archive listing updated in April 2022.
The campaign's approach is classified as symbolic representation of product benefit rather than conventional product demonstration — meaning the watch itself is present in the work as an idea rather than as a catalogue item. This is a creative posture more common in fragrance and luxury fashion advertising than in the personal accessories and lifestyle sector occupied by a young Danish brand. For Nordgreen in 2018, deploying that language in a digital Christmas campaign signals a confidence in brand voice that belies the company's age. The restraint is the craft.
No verified performance data for "It's About Time" is publicly available. No published sales lift, revenue growth, market-share movement, conversion rate, or website traffic figures have been documented in connection with the campaign, and no entries or wins have been recorded across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's editorial research.
Structural analysis, however, offers a meaningful alternative frame. The campaign's single-asset digital format, deployed in Denmark during December 2018, concentrates all persuasive energy into one moment of contact with the audience. For a brand founded in 2017, that economy of means reduces production risk while forcing creative clarity — a rational trade-off for a company still building its advertising infrastructure. The central line, "It's not about the gifts we give, it's about the time we spend," operates as a brand-level statement rather than a sales mechanism, which means its effectiveness is better measured in long-term perception than in short-term conversion.
The campaign's decision to reframe a watch as a symbol of time rather than a marker of status or technology is a structurally sound positioning move in a market where both heritage Swiss brands and Apple commanded more immediate consumer recognition. Whether that positioning achieved durable brand equity in Denmark's fashion and apparel landscape is not answerable from available data. What is clear is that the ambition of the creative idea — philosophically coherent, emotionally grounded, tonally consistent with Danish design values — exceeded the modest scale of its single-asset execution.
Clapboard Score: 61/100.
"It's About Time" is a December 2018 digital holiday campaign published in Denmark for Copenhagen watch brand Nordgreen. The campaign uses a single media asset to argue that time spent with loved ones matters more than gifts exchanged, positioning the wristwatch as a symbol of that shared time rather than a retail object.
The campaign was created by a team including Creative Director Line Otto, Art Director and Illustrator Esther Günnewig, Copywriter Jessica Knudsen, and Photographer Anthony Rubinstein, according to the Ads of the World archive. Nordgreen co-founder Vasilij Brandt served as Project Manager and Social Media Planner on the production.
The campaign targeted the Danish market in December 2018, timed to the Christmas gifting season. Nordgreen, founded in Copenhagen in 2017 by Pascar Sivam and Vasilij Brandt, positioned the campaign within Denmark's personal accessories and lifestyle category against both heritage watch brands and the growing smartwatch segment.
No awards have been recorded for "It's About Time" across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's editorial research. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100, reflecting its creative ambition relative to its single-asset scale.
The campaign's central line states that it is not about the gifts we give but about the time we spend together. This framing repositions Nordgreen's wristwatch as a symbol of life's most meaningful resource rather than a product defined by price, heritage, or technology — a deliberate contrast to conventional holiday watch advertising.
Published just one year after Nordgreen's 2017 founding, "It's About Time" functions as an early brand-positioning statement rather than a pure sales campaign. By aligning the watch with emotional presence over material gifting, it establishes a values-led identity in Denmark's fashion and lifestyle market distinct from both Swiss heritage competitors and smartwatch rivals.
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