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Tout Faire Turns Tradespeople Into Athletes for France
Tout Faire's Célébrons les artisans campaign, created by BUY TBWA in 2024, is an integrated awareness initiative that repositions French tradespeople as elite performers by drawing a deliberate parallel between construction craftspeople and competitive athletes, deployed across print, experiential, and film channels throughout France.
Tout Faire is an independent builders' merchants group operating approximately 450 outlets across France. With professional tradespeople accounting for 65% of its customer base, the group had direct and sustained visibility into a growing crisis of perception affecting the building trades in France. The campaign launched publicly in February 2024, with its inaugural activation at the Tout Faire trade show in Lyon on January 24 and 25, 2024, according to records documented at adsoftheworld.com and toutfaire.fr. Five real artisans — Alioune, Hossein, Maeva, Matthias, and Pierre-Frédéric — were placed at the centre of the creative work, representing the profession with specificity rather than abstraction, as noted in campaign documentation at adsoftheworld.com.
The timing was deliberate. With major international sporting competitions approaching in 2024, Tout Faire positioned the campaign around a cultural moment the entire country was already primed to engage with. The central argument was straightforward: behind the stadiums and the athletes who perform inside them stand craftspeople whose daily feats go unrecognised. The campaign's integrated execution spanned a 350-square-metre monumental outdoor tarpaulin, a film produced with PICSPROD, and print activations rolled out across Tout Faire's network of 450 outlets throughout France, as confirmed by adsoftheworld.com and leclubdesda.org. Clapboard scores Célébrons les artisans at 69 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that earns its relevance through strategic sincerity rather than creative spectacle.
Tout Faire identified a measurable deterioration in the public image of building trades across France before commissioning the campaign. To quantify that deficit, the group partnered with OpinionWay to conduct a wide-ranging study titled "What place for the construction and building trades in France? What are the challenges for the future?" which surveyed 1,000 members of the French public and 302 construction and building tradespeople. The findings were striking: 84% of French people considered skilled trades important to the French economy, and 63% valued the sector for its contribution to preserving French territory, yet 67% simultaneously believed that the building trades were unrecognised or even unappreciated, according to that OpinionWay study commissioned by Tout Faire.
This contradiction — high economic respect, low social prestige — produces concrete consequences. According to randstadprofessional.fr and episto.fr, recruitment difficulties and succession challenges are persistent structural problems within France's construction sector, with family-run trade businesses increasingly unable to attract new entrants or find successors. The devaluation of the trades has a compounding effect: fewer young people enter, fewer businesses survive transition, and the perception gap widens further.
In this context, Tout Faire entered the campaign with a documented unaided brand awareness of 2% and a share of voice of 3.25% before launch, according to the Effie case description cited at the 2024 Effie Awards. Competitors such as Leroy Merlin and Point P operate with substantially greater brand visibility in the French market, commanding larger advertising budgets and broader consumer recognition. Against that backdrop, Célébrons les artisans was not a conventional brand-building exercise. It was a cultural intervention designed to shift national conversation around a profession that Tout Faire depends on and believes in.
Photographer François Rousseau led the visual identity of Célébrons les artisans, bringing a body of work known for its attention to the human form and physical presence, as documented at leclubdesda.org and adsoftheworld.com. His approach translated directly into the campaign's core visual language: tradespeople photographed with the same compositional gravity and heroic framing typically reserved for professional athletes. The result was imagery that did not flatter or sentimentalise the subject but instead elevated it through formal seriousness.
The most prominent physical expression of that visual language was a monumental outdoor tarpaulin measuring more than 350 square metres, installed as a centrepiece of the experiential activation at the Tout Faire trade show in Lyon on January 24 and 25, 2024, per documentation at adsoftheworld.com and toutfaire.fr. At that scale, the work functioned less as advertising and more as public declaration — a statement about status and recognition made in the architectural register of the city itself.
BUY TBWA, the agency's dedicated retail and trade communications unit based in Paris, developed the integrated structure of the campaign, weaving together print, experiential installation, and film into a coherent system rather than a series of disconnected executions, as noted at tbwa-paris.com. The film component was produced by PICSPROD, extending the campaign's reach beyond physical outlets into video channels. The network rollout distributed creative materials across all 450 Tout Faire outlets throughout France, ensuring that the campaign's message reached both the professional tradespeople who are the group's primary customers and the broader public in the communities those outlets serve, according to records at adsoftheworld.com. The creative strategy named in Stratégies as among the best of the week on January 30, 2024, positioned the campaign as emotionally positive without being sentimental — a tone that proved central to its reception.
Célébrons les artisans won a Bronze Effie Award in the Communication corporate et B to B category at the 2024 Effie Awards France, according to the Effie Awards organisation. No verified recognition from Cannes Lions, One Show, D&AD, Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC has been publicly documented for the campaign, per available award records at those organisations.
On measurable brand metrics, the campaign produced movement from a low base. Tout Faire entered with 2% unaided brand awareness and a 3.25% share of voice before launch, according to the Effie case description. The campaign subsequently increased brand awareness substantially and revitalised members' pride in group belonging, according to that same Effie case documentation. The mechanism behind that result was partly economic efficiency: the campaign multiplied the impact of its media budget through earned media, according to the Effie case description, suggesting that the cultural resonance of the athlete-tradesperson parallel generated coverage and amplification beyond paid placements.
Charles Gaël Chaloyard of Tout Faire articulated the foundation of that connection, stating — as documented at linkedin.com — that with approximately 50,000 tradespeople passing through Tout Faire stores every day, the group understands not only their needs but also their practices, commitment, professionalism, and human qualities, sharing with them a love of work done well. That institutional authenticity, grounded in daily commercial relationships with the profession rather than external observation, gave the campaign a credibility that structural analysis suggests was central to its effectiveness. For a brand operating with limited share of voice against larger competitors in the French market, earned amplification and member-level emotional impact represent a proportionate and sustainable return on a campaign of this kind.
Célébrons les artisans is a 2024 integrated awareness campaign by Tout Faire and BUY TBWA in France. It repositions construction tradespeople as elite performers, drawing a direct parallel with competitive athletes. The campaign used print, a monumental 350-square-metre tarpaulin, experiential activation in Lyon, and film produced by PICSPROD across 450 outlets.
Tout Faire launched the campaign in response to a measurable image deficit affecting building trades in France. An OpinionWay study commissioned by Tout Faire found that 67% of French people believed the building trades were unrecognised or unappreciated, creating recruitment and succession problems that directly affect the group's professional customer base.
BUY TBWA, the Paris-based retail unit of TBWA, created the campaign for Tout Faire. Photographer François Rousseau led the visual identity, applying his characteristic focus on the human form to portrait tradespeople with the same heroic framing used for elite athletes. Film production was handled by PICSPROD.
Célébrons les artisans won a Bronze Effie Award in the Communication corporate et B to B category at the 2024 Effie Awards France, according to the Effie Awards organisation. No verified recognition from Cannes Lions, One Show, D&AD, Clios, or the Webby Awards has been publicly documented for the campaign.
Tout Faire entered the campaign with 2% unaided brand awareness and 3.25% share of voice, according to the Effie case description. The campaign increased brand awareness substantially and revitalised member pride in group belonging. It also multiplied its media budget impact through earned media, according to the same Effie case documentation.
The campaign launched at the Tout Faire trade show in Lyon on January 24 and 25, 2024, anchored by a 350-square-metre monumental outdoor tarpaulin. It then rolled out across all 450 Tout Faire outlets throughout France through integrated print, experiential, and film channels, according to documentation at adsoftheworld.com and toutfaire.fr.
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