Purelygreat's 2019 'Witch, Competitive' campaign used medieval humour across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to challenge Canadian consumer scepticism about
ARCHIVEHow Purelygreat's Witch Hunt Ad Disrupted Natural Deodorant in Canada
Purelygreat's 'Witch, Competitive' campaign is a pair of humorous online video spots, launched in Canada in October 2019, in which medieval peasants debate body odour and conclude that a woman who smells pleasant must be a witch, inverting category conventions to address scepticism about whether natural deodorant actually works.
The campaign launched on October 15, 2019, according to kawarthaNOW, with launch coverage appearing as early as October 8, 2019. Distributed across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the two films gave Purelygreat — a family-run, Peterborough-based brand founded in Toronto in 2011, according to kawarthaNOW — its most visible creative platform to date. The brand entered this campaign as an EWG VERIFIED natural deodorant, a certification denoting that every ingredient has been reviewed against the Environmental Working Group's health and transparency standards, and it carried that credential into the narrative rather than relegating it to a product-shot end card.
Purelygreat built its identity around a clear wellness proposition: aluminum-free, triclosan-free, paraben-free, vegan, and cruelty-free formulations sold through approximately 500 Canadian stores — including Winners, Marshalls, Well.ca, and Amazon — as well as its own ecommerce platform at mynaturaldeodorant.com, according to Strategyonline Ca. The 'Witch, Competitive' campaign was not a continuation of a prior creative series but a deliberate new direction, designed to be disruptive inside a healthcare and personal-care category that had historically defaulted to functional claims and clean-aesthetic visuals. In the Canadian market, where health-conscious consumers were increasingly scrutinising ingredient lists, Purelygreat chose comedy and narrative over convention. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 60 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and clear strategic intent against modest measurable reach for a brand of this scale.
ARCHIVEPurelygreat identified consumer scepticism as the primary barrier to trial in the Canadian natural deodorant market. The central doubt — that natural formulations simply do not perform as well as conventional ones — was widespread enough to suppress conversion even among health-conscious shoppers already seeking cleaner alternatives. Rather than meeting that scepticism with reassurance copy or ingredient transparency alone, the brand chose to dramatise the doubt itself, making the peasants' suspicion of an odourless woman the engine of the comedy.
The global natural deodorant market was estimated at approximately one point eight two billion US dollars in 2025 and is forecast to reach four point three three billion US dollars by 2034, representing a compound annual growth rate of ten point one percent over that period, according to Dataintelo. While a reliable market-size figure specific to 2019 was not available in public sources at the time of this analysis, the trajectory confirms that the natural personal-care segment was already attracting significant competitive pressure in Canada by the time Purelygreat launched its campaign. Competitors operating in this space included Schmidt's Naturals, which expanded its mission and product scope in 2017 according to schmidts.com, and Native, a direct-to-consumer specialist founded in 2015 and subsequently acquired by Procter and Gamble, according to MediaPost. Against rivals with substantially greater distribution budgets, Purelygreat's strategic logic was sound: a small brand distributing through around five hundred Canadian retail doors, according to strategyonline.ca, could not outspend its way to attention and needed creative distinctiveness to earn it. Pete Henderson, director at Someplace Nice, captured this directly in remarks to Muse by Clio on October 8, 2019, stating that breaking through was of huge importance for a client of this size.
Pete Henderson directed the Purelygreat 'Witch Hunt' campaign through production company Someplace Nice. Henderson's creative approach took the product's core proposition — it's all-natural — and extended it into a period-comedy conceit in which medieval peasants, unaccustomed to encountering anyone who smells genuinely clean, interpret pleasantness as evidence of witchcraft. The logic is circular and absurd, which is precisely the point: the films hold a mirror to the circular reasoning consumers apply when they distrust natural deodorant on instinct rather than evidence.
Reviewing the campaign for Muse by Clio on October 8, 2019, critic David Gianatasio characterised the tone as bleakly comic and drew a comparison to Monty Python, a reference that locates the films inside a specific tradition of British absurdist comedy where institutional suspicion and crowd logic are exposed through deadpan escalation. Henderson confirmed in the same publication that the idea came from the product itself, and that the brand had deliberately rejected the classic product shot in favour of something disruptive for the category. That decision — to subordinate pack shots and ingredient call-outs to a sustained comic narrative — was itself a craft choice. The two-film format, distributed across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, gave the campaign structural room to build a world rather than simply land a joke. Strategy published a positive editorial review on October 8, 2019, highlighting how the medieval witch-hunt narrative functioned as a vehicle for addressing consumer scepticism directly, framing the campaign as purposeful rather than merely playful. Production credits beyond Henderson's directorial role are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
No verified third-party performance data — including view counts, engagement rates, or sales-lift figures — for the 'Witch, Competitive' campaign is publicly available at the time of this analysis. What the public record does provide is a consistent pattern of favourable editorial reception across several Canadian and international trade outlets, which serves as a proxy indicator of earned-media effectiveness for a brand operating without a large paid-media budget.
Strategy, one of Canada's principal advertising trade publications, reviewed the campaign positively on October 8, 2019, treating the medieval-narrative device as a legitimate strategic solution rather than a novelty. Muse by Clio published David Gianatasio's review on the same date, and kawarthaNOW provided local business coverage on October 15, 2019, confirming the campaign reached both trade and consumer press simultaneously. For Purelygreat — a brand distributed through approximately five hundred Canadian retail locations, according to strategyonline.ca, and built around a direct-to-consumer ecommerce model — earned editorial attention of this kind carries disproportionate weight relative to what a conventional product-shot campaign might have generated. The EWG VERIFIED credential, woven into the campaign's identity rather than treated as a footnote, gave health-conscious Canadian consumers a verifiable third-party signal to act on. The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on this alignment: a clear and defensible product truth, a memorable and category-unusual creative vehicle, and distribution channels — Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube — well-matched to the brand's target audience in Canada.
Purelygreat's 'Witch, Competitive' campaign is a pair of humorous online video spots launched in Canada in October 2019. The films feature medieval peasants who suspect a pleasant-smelling woman of witchcraft, using absurdist comedy to address widespread consumer scepticism about natural deodorant effectiveness. The campaign ran on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Pete Henderson directed the Purelygreat 'Witch Hunt' campaign through production company Someplace Nice. Henderson stated in Muse by Clio on October 8, 2019, that the idea came directly from the product itself, and that the brand deliberately chose a disruptive creative approach over a conventional product-demonstration format.
Purelygreat used the medieval witch-hunt premise to dramatise consumer scepticism about natural deodorant performance. Rather than answering doubts with ingredient lists, the films made scepticism itself the comic subject. Strategy noted on October 8, 2019, that this approach directly addressed the core barrier to trial in the Canadian market.
EWG VERIFIED is a certification from the Environmental Working Group confirming that every ingredient in a product meets the organisation's health and transparency standards. Purelygreat carries this certification across its natural deodorant range, and the 2019 'Witch Hunt' campaign used it as a credibility anchor alongside the brand's aluminum-free, paraben-free formulation claims.
Purelygreat was distributing through approximately five hundred Canadian retail stores by 2019, according to strategyonline.ca. Stockists included Winners, Marshalls, Well.ca, and Amazon, alongside the brand's own ecommerce platform. The company was founded in Toronto in 2011 by Debbie Cohen and Philip Pellat, according to kawarthaNOW.
Purelygreat's 'Witch, Competitive' campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative ambition and a clear strategic rationale for the Canadian natural deodorant market, balanced against the limited measurable reach typical of a brand-funded campaign at this scale without a disclosed agency or large paid-media budget.
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