ARCHIVEQuilted Northern Turns Toilet Paper Into a Pop Anthem
Quilted Northern's 'We Quilt This City' is a sixty-second music-video-style television and digital commercial, created by Orchard and launched in the United States in August 2024, that parodies Starship's 1980s anthem 'We Built This City' to position the brand as the definitive authority on comfort in the household products category through a fictional girl group called the Quilted Queens.
The campaign arrived as a refreshed expression of Quilted Northern's broader 'Keep It Quilted' platform, which, according to orchardcreative.com, was originally established in late 2022 under agency Argonaut. Where that earlier effort focused on moving the brand away from broad bathroom humor toward comfort and everyday ritual, 'We Quilt This City' accelerates that repositioning through sheer entertainment. The central slogan — 'We Quilt This City with a comfy roll!' — is designed to function as an earworm that keeps the brand's core promise of softness and reliability front of mind long after the spot ends.
The Quilted Queens are three women performers who serve as recurring brand characters embodying expertise, confidence, and warmth. Their presence gives Quilted Northern a repeatable, scalable creative asset within the United States market, replacing the transactional logic of most household product advertising with something closer to pop-culture fandom. The film ran across television, digital, and social media channels, according to orchardcreative.com, reaching audiences at multiple points in the media environment. On YouTube alone the spot accumulated more than 73,000 views and over 260 comments, signalling an unusual level of audience engagement for a toilet paper brand. Quilted Northern is a Georgia-Pacific bath-tissue brand, as noted by orchardcreative.com, competing in a category where emotional differentiation is rarely attempted and even more rarely executed with the polish evident here. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 62 out of 100.
ARCHIVEQuilted Northern held the fourth position in the United States toilet paper category at the time of the campaign's launch, according to orchardcreative.com. That competitive reality shapes everything about the strategic logic behind 'We Quilt This City.' Brands in the lower positions of a mature household product category face a structural disadvantage: category leaders such as Charmin and Cottonelle command disproportionate shelf visibility and media recall, leaving challengers with the choice of outspending or outsmarting.
Orchard chose the latter. The agency pitched and won the Quilted Northern business, per orchardcreative.com, and identified narrative as the mechanism most likely to close the awareness gap. Rather than foregrounding product attributes — ply count, texture, sheet length — the campaign foregrounds feeling. The Quilted Queens embody comfort as a lifestyle posture, speaking to consumers who treat everyday domestic rituals as worthy of genuine pleasure rather than mere efficiency. This is consistent with the strategic direction established in 2022, when the 'Keep It Quilted' platform deliberately pivoted toward shopper relevance and comfort, moving away from the potty humor that has historically dominated the household products category in United States advertising, according to orchardcreative.com.
The tissue and toilet paper market in the United States sits within a broader global category that researchandmarkets.com and indexbox.io estimate at between forty-one billion and seventy-one billion dollars in 2024, depending on scope and methodology, with growth projected at roughly four to five percent compounded annually through the early 2030s. In a market that large and that stable, brand salience — not product innovation — is the primary lever for share gain. 'We Quilt This City' is engineered precisely for salience: a memorable melody, a confident visual identity developed in part through Soulsight's packaging work from 2022, per orchardcreative.com, and characters designed to be recognisable across repeated exposures.
Tajana Tokyo directed 'We Quilt This City' for Quilted Northern and Orchard. Tokyo brings a performance-entertainment background that is directly legible in the finished film: according to musebyclios.com, she previously danced on stage alongside Beyoncé, and that fluency with large-scale choreography and pop spectacle shapes every frame of the spot. The result reads less like a household product advertisement and more like a legitimate music video, which is precisely the creative intention.
The production was shot in Romania, according to heatherlarimer.com, a logistical choice that allowed the production to achieve a visual scale and set ambition uncommon in the household industry category without the cost structure of a domestic shoot. The creative team at Orchard included Creative Director Heather Larimer and Copywriter Christine Taffe, both credited across the campaign's documentation at heatherlarimer.com. Their approach, as described by Creative Review's Sarah Dawood, was a 'sing-song' celebration of comfort that consciously prioritised entertainment over realism — a deliberate departure from the demonstration-led conventions of toilet paper advertising in the United States.
Casting was a central craft decision. Orchard reviewed more than four hundred women across a range of ages, ethnicities, and body types before selecting the final trio of Quilted Queens, according to creativereview.co.uk. That casting rigour reflects a commitment to the believability of the characters as a genuine girl group rather than advertising constructs, and it extends the brand's positioning around comfort into the realm of inclusivity. Muse by Clio framed the execution as a 'soft' creative approach — one that uses warmth and charm rather than hyperbole to make its argument for Quilted Northern as the comfort authority in the household products space across the United States market. The sixty-second runtime gives the musical parody room to establish its hook and pay it off without feeling truncated.
Quilted Northern's 'We Quilt This City' generated documented audience engagement on YouTube, where the campaign accumulated more than 73,000 views and 528 likes, with over 269 comments registered on the platform. For a household product in a category not typically associated with organic viewer participation, that comment volume is a meaningful signal of creative resonance. The campaign ran across television, digital, and social media in the United States, according to orchardcreative.com, which means YouTube metrics represent only one segment of the total impression footprint.
No verified awards have been identified for 'We Quilt This City' across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC, based on publicly available records. The campaign did attract editorial attention from trade press, including Creative Review and Muse by Clio, both of which engaged with the creative execution in depth — a form of earned media visibility that carries weight for a brand seeking to elevate its cultural standing within the household industry.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several durable mechanisms. The musical parody of a widely recognised song gives audiences an immediate cognitive hook. The Quilted Queens are a repeatable character system that can sustain a long-running platform rather than a single burst of awareness. And the decision to cast inclusively — reviewing more than four hundred women before finalising the trio, per creativereview.co.uk — builds an audience identification layer that pure product advertising cannot replicate. Together these elements position 'We Quilt This City' as a strategic foundation for Quilted Northern's ongoing effort to convert the comfort narrative into measurable category share within the United States market. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 62 out of 100 reflects solid creative execution tempered by the absence of independently verified performance metrics.
'We Quilt This City' is a sixty-second commercial launched by Quilted Northern in August 2024. Created by Orchard and directed by Tajana Tokyo, the spot parodies Starship's 'We Built This City,' starring a fictional girl group called the Quilted Queens. It ran across television, digital, and social media in the United States.
The Quilted Queens are three women performers created as recurring brand characters for Quilted Northern. Orchard reviewed more than four hundred women across ages, ethnicities, and body types before casting the final trio, according to creativereview.co.uk. The characters embody expertise and confidence in everyday comfort as part of the broader 'Keep It Quilted' platform.
Orchard Creative produced 'We Quilt This City' for Quilted Northern in 2024. Orchard pitched and won the Quilted Northern account, according to orchardcreative.com. The agency team included Creative Director Heather Larimer and Copywriter Christine Taffe, with direction by Tajana Tokyo and production filmed on location in Romania.
The campaign parodies 'We Built This City,' a 1980s anthem by Starship. Quilted Northern adapts the song to 'We Quilt This City with a comfy roll,' according to orchardcreative.com. The musical hook is designed to keep the brand's comfort positioning memorable well beyond a viewer's first exposure to the advertisement.
Quilted Northern held the fourth position in the United States toilet paper category at the time of the campaign's launch, according to orchardcreative.com. It competes against category leaders including Charmin and Cottonelle. The 'We Quilt This City' campaign was designed in part to close the brand awareness gap through cultural entertainment rather than product promotion.
No verified awards for 'We Quilt This City' have been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC based on publicly available records. The campaign did receive editorial coverage from Creative Review and Muse by Clio, representing meaningful earned trade-press recognition for a household product advertisement.
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