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How Tens Used Daydreamers to Champion Analogue Living
Tens launched Daydreamers in the United Kingdom in March 2017, a short narrative film promoting five new sunglass styles that used a hybrid of digital and 16mm footage to contrast the warmth of lived experience against the cold flatness of a world mediated by screens.
The campaign originated with Edinburgh-based eyewear brand Tens, a company co-founded by photographers Kris Reid, Marty Bell, and Tom Welsh. Production was handled entirely in-house: Reid and Bell produced the film, while Welsh operated the camera, as reported by The Drum. The crew travelled to Mexico, including locations in and around Tulum, to shoot footage that would underpin the SS17 collection reveal. A Kickstarter pre-order mechanism accompanied the film, giving audiences a direct commercial pathway alongside the narrative content. Mexico City-based photographer Omar Coria contributed the accompanying lookbook imagery.
The film's central proposition is rooted in the Tens brand ethos established at the company's founding in Edinburgh. Tens first positioned its tinted lenses as an Instagram filter for real life during a 2014 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, as noted by Creative Boom, and Daydreamers extends that idea into fully formed storytelling. In the United Kingdom, where the campaign was published, the film asked viewers to reconsider why they participate in experiences at all — whether for genuine feeling or for social media performance. The Clapboard Score for Daydreamers stands at 71 out of 100, reflecting a campaign whose craft ambition and conceptual clarity exceed the modest production scale typical of founder-led brand films.
Tens built Daydreamers on a cultural insight that was gaining traction across the United Kingdom in early 2017. The campaign arrived at a moment when mainstream conversation about social media authenticity was intensifying, and Tens positioned its product directly at the fault line between curated online life and unmediated physical experience.
The strategic move is consistent with Tens's founding positioning. According to Creative Boom, the brand spent approximately two years developing its signature warm-tinted lens before the 2014 Indiegogo launch, which raised approximately $100,000 to $111,000 and framed the product as an analogue enhancement to vision rather than a digital filter. Daydreamers amplifies that logic: the lens is not just an aesthetic object but an argument for a different quality of attention. Co-founder Kris Reid stated in The Drum that the film's narration was designed to highlight the importance of relationships offline and the value of experiencing things because you genuinely want to, not because you want to be seen doing so online.
In the United Kingdom personal accessories market, Tens occupied a niche that larger eyewear competitors such as Oakley and Ray-Ban do not address directly. Both of those brands speak to performance or heritage respectively; neither makes the act of perception itself — the quality of the light you see — its primary selling point. Tens's strategy in Daydreamers is to deepen that differentiation through emotional narrative rather than product specification, using film as the medium most capable of conveying warmth and sensory texture. No verified UK-specific market share data for the independent fashion eyewear segment in 2017 is publicly available, and the research categories that do exist, as noted by Research and Markets, relate to medically distinct product lines.
Kris Reid directed Daydreamers. Reid is a co-founder of Tens and a photographer by background, and that dual sensibility shapes every formal decision in the film.
The production's defining technical choice is the combination of digital and 16mm film footage. As Reid explained to The Drum, the team aimed to capture the juxtaposition between a colder, muted world without Tens and the warm, granular effect of wearing them. Digital footage handles the former register: clean, slightly cool, precise. The 16mm material carries the latter: grain, warmth, the slight unpredictability of an analogue medium that cannot be fully controlled in post-production. The structural contrast between the two formats does work that voiceover or title cards could not do alone — it makes the sensory argument visible.
Shooting took place in Mexico, with Tulum serving as a primary location, as reported by The Drum. The choice of setting is itself a creative decision. Tulum in 2017 occupied a particular cultural position as both a genuinely beautiful destination and an extremely photographed one, which gives the film's argument about authenticity versus performance a specific geographic texture. Omar Coria, a Mexico City-based photographer, handled the lookbook stills that accompanied the campaign. The five new sunglass styles featured in the film were constructed from Mazzucchelli Italian acetate, Japanese wireframe components, and Tens's signature lens tint, according to The Drum, and the production treats these materials as story details rather than spec-sheet items. The frames appear in the film as objects that belong in a warm, tactile world — which is precisely the world the 16mm footage is designed to evoke.
No verified performance data for the Daydreamers campaign is publicly available. Tens has not disclosed figures for views, conversion rates, or Kickstarter pre-order volumes attributed specifically to the film, and no third-party audit of campaign outcomes has been published.
Structural analysis offers a more honest basis for assessment. The campaign integrates three mechanisms that compound one another: a narrative film with genuine craft investment, a product reveal tied to a Kickstarter pre-order that creates urgency, and a lookbook by an independent photographer that extends the visual world across a second format. Each element reinforces the others rather than operating in isolation. The Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects this integration alongside the film's conceptual discipline. The offline-living argument is not grafted onto the product — it is the product, articulated through the lens tint itself, which literally changes how the wearer sees the world.
The campaign also demonstrates a cost-effective model for founder-led brands operating in the United Kingdom. By keeping production in-house — Reid and Bell producing, Welsh filming — Tens avoided agency fees while retaining full creative control over a film whose formal ambitions, specifically the 16mm and digital hybrid structure, would typically require specialist post-production budget. The result is a piece of branded content that reads as authored rather than assembled, which is the condition most difficult to manufacture and most durable in its cultural effect.
Daydreamers is a short narrative film Tens published in the United Kingdom in March 2017 to launch its SS17 collection. Shot by the brand's co-founders in Mexico, the film used a mix of digital and 16mm footage to argue for offline presence and genuine experience over social media performance, per The Drum.
Kris Reid directed Daydreamers. Reid is a co-founder of Tens, and co-founder Tom Welsh filmed it, according to The Drum. Co-founder Marty Bell co-produced the campaign alongside Reid. The production was handled entirely in-house without a disclosed external agency.
Tens used 16mm film to create a visual contrast with digital footage. As Kris Reid explained to The Drum, the digital material represented a colder, muted world without Tens, while the 16mm conveyed the warm, granular quality of wearing the lenses, making the product's sensory argument visible rather than stated.
Daydreamers was filmed in Mexico, including locations around Tulum, as reported by The Drum. Mexico City-based photographer Omar Coria shot the accompanying lookbook stills. The choice of Tulum, a heavily photographed destination, gave the film's argument about authenticity versus social media performance a pointed geographic resonance.
Daydreamers promoted five new sunglass styles from the Tens SS17 collection, according to The Drum. The frames were constructed from Mazzucchelli Italian acetate and Japanese wireframe components, finished with Tens's signature warm-tinted lens. The campaign supported exclusive pre-orders through Kickstarter, giving the film a direct commercial function alongside its narrative purpose.
The Tens Daydreamers campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the film's conceptual discipline and its hybrid 16mm and digital craft, balanced against the absence of a disclosed agency and the limited scale of independent brand production within the United Kingdom personal accessories category.
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