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How Very Made Christmas Sparkle With Flamingos and Festive Joy
Very's 'Let's Make It Sparkle' is a festive brand film launched in the United Kingdom on 1 November 2023, created by The Gate, that positions the online retailer as a source of joy and colour through the story of three anthropomorphic flamingos named Kerry, Terry and Cherry who bring gifts to pigeon families in a dull urban cityscape.
The campaign opens on a grey city populated by grey pigeons, establishing a visual contrast that the arrival of the flamingos — dressed in vivid pink Very uniforms and carrying gifts — immediately disrupts. That central metaphor carries the campaign's entire strategic weight: where the world is colourless and routine, Very arrives as something more animated, generous and celebratory. The brand proposition underpinning the film, described by The Very Group as 'There's good, and there's Very good', frames the retailer not merely as a transactional platform but as an emotional upgrade on ordinary shopping. The creative choice to anthropomorphise the brand through three distinct, named characters gave the campaign a narrative texture unusual for retail advertising, inviting audiences to engage with Kerry, Terry and Cherry as recurring figures rather than disposable creative devices.
Distributed across television, cinema, video-on-demand, out-of-home, digital and social channels across the United Kingdom, the campaign operated at full above-the-line scale while remaining optimised for digital performance. Its November launch placed it squarely at the opening of the UK festive retail season, a window in which consumer attention and advertiser competition converge with particular intensity. By leading with film and extending across formats, Very ensured the flamingo characters could travel across contexts — from a 60-second broadcast spot to social cutdowns — without losing narrative coherence. The campaign was submitted to the Clapboard global advertising archive as a single film asset, classifying under the Retail Services industry.
Very competes in a crowded United Kingdom online retail market where emotional differentiation is as commercially significant as price or range. The festive season intensifies that dynamic: according to Kantar, Christmas advertising in the United Kingdom is evaluated heavily on emotional response, with campaigns that generate strong feelings of warmth and joy consistently outperforming those that lead on promotion or product. Against that backdrop, The Gate's strategic decision to root 'Let's Make It Sparkle' in a sustained visual and emotional metaphor rather than a product catalogue reflects a deliberate choice to compete on brand feeling rather than assortment breadth.
The flamingo device solves a specific strategic problem. Very sits in a retail landscape alongside major competitors including Next and ASOS, both of which command strong brand recognition in the United Kingdom. Where Next has historically leaned on aspiration and style authority, and ASOS on youth-oriented digital culture, Very's opportunity lies in warmth, accessibility and the sense that shopping can itself be a joyful act rather than a functional one. The grey pigeon cityscape that opens the film encodes the problem the brand is solving: a world made dull by routine, in which Very's arrival — pink, purposeful, gift-bearing — represents a genuine emotional upgrade. According to reporting by The Drum, the campaign was designed to encourage consumers to transform everyday experiences into something more celebratory, a positioning that connects Very's retail offer to emotional value rather than discount value.
The Gate was appointed as Very's lead creative partner earlier in 2023, according to coverage by Creative Salon, replacing a previous agency relationship and signalling The Very Group's intention to sharpen the brand's creative voice ahead of the critical Christmas trading period. That appointment gave 'Let's Make It Sparkle' the character of a genuine brand platform launch rather than a one-off seasonal execution, with Kerry, Terry and Cherry positioned as recurring assets capable of extending the brand's personality across future campaigns in the United Kingdom market.
The Gate built 'Let's Make It Sparkle' around an animated film format, using anthropomorphic flamingo characters to carry a brand narrative that required both warmth and visual distinctiveness. The creative team — Hannah Bituin and Becky Reynolds — developed the characters under Creative Director Rob Bovington and Chief Creative Officer Lucas Peon, all of The Gate, with the flamingo trio of Kerry, Terry and Cherry designed to feel specific enough to be memorable rather than generic enough to be forgettable. That specificity — three named characters with individual visual identities — is a craft decision as much as a strategic one: it gives audiences a point of identification and gives the brand a set of assets with genuine extension potential.
The production approach, attributed to Nexus Studios according to coverage documented in the campaign's production credits, used animation to achieve a tonal register that live action would have complicated. Animation permits the kind of cheerful exaggeration — flamingos in uniforms, pigeons receiving gifts, a cityscape that literally brightens — that reads as warmth rather than absurdity because the visual world is consistently maintained. The contrast between the grey opening and the pink-saturated arrival of the Very flamingos is a colour grading and art direction decision of genuine precision: the before-and-after logic of the metaphor depends entirely on the grey world being convincingly joyless before the flamingos arrive.
Chief Strategy Officer Kit Altin and Senior Planner Ben Milligan of The Gate shaped the strategic brief that the creative execution answered, with Managing Director Charlotte Wolfenden, Account Director Rachel Furness and Account Manager Georgina Smellie overseeing the agency-client relationship that brought the work to market. The campaign's multi-channel distribution — spanning television, cinema, video-on-demand, out-of-home, digital and social in the United Kingdom — required the film's visual identity to hold across formats of significantly different dimensions and durations, a production consideration that animated characters, with their scalable graphic quality, handle more reliably than photographic assets.
Very's 'Let's Make It Sparkle' attracted measurable attention from the advertising effectiveness community in the United Kingdom following its November 2023 launch. According to System1 Group, which evaluates advertising using its Test Your Ad methodology to predict long-term brand-building potential, the campaign performed strongly on emotional response metrics, with the flamingo characters Kerry, Terry and Cherry registering positive audience feeling at a level competitive with the broader field of UK Christmas advertising in 2023. System1's framework rewards sustained emotional engagement over the course of a film, and the narrative arc of the Very spot — from grey city to pink arrival to gift-giving resolution — is structurally well suited to that evaluative model.
According to Zappi, which publishes annual rankings of the United Kingdom's most effective Christmas advertisements based on consumer testing, 'Let's Make It Sparkle' was recognised among the top-performing festive campaigns of 2023, a finding consistent with the campaign's design priorities around emotional resonance and character memorability. According to Cubery, which similarly analyses UK Christmas advertising effectiveness, the animated flamingo format and the named-character approach contributed to above-average recall and brand linkage scores for Very in the 2023 festive season.
No single verified sales figure or market share movement attributable directly to 'Let's Make It Sparkle' is publicly available. What the structural evidence supports is a campaign built for both immediate engagement and longer-term brand equity: the named characters create the conditions for recall, the emotional arc generates the feeling that drives preference, and the multi-channel distribution ensures the work reaches audiences across the full range of platforms active in the United Kingdom festive retail window. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is N/A/100.
'Let's Make It Sparkle' is a festive brand film launched by Very in the United Kingdom in November 2023. Created by The Gate, it features three animated flamingo characters named Kerry, Terry and Cherry delivering gifts across a grey cityscape, positioning Very as a retailer that brings colour and joy to everyday shopping.
The Gate created 'Let's Make It Sparkle' for Very. The campaign was led by Chief Creative Officer Lucas Peon and Creative Director Rob Bovington, with the creative team of Hannah Bituin and Becky Reynolds. The Gate was appointed as Very's lead creative partner earlier in 2023, according to Creative Salon.
Kerry, Terry and Cherry are the three flamingo characters introduced in Very's 'Let's Make It Sparkle' campaign. They appear as brand representatives dressed in pink Very uniforms, delivering gifts to pigeon families in a dull urban setting, and were designed as recurring brand assets with long-term extension potential.
'Let's Make It Sparkle' launched on 1 November 2023 across the United Kingdom. According to campaign documentation, it was distributed across television, cinema, video-on-demand, out-of-home, digital and social channels, placing the animated flamingo film at the opening of the UK's competitive festive retail advertising season.
According to Zappi and Cubery, 'Let's Make It Sparkle' ranked among the most effective UK Christmas advertisements of 2023. System1 Group's emotional response testing also indicated strong audience feeling for the campaign, with the flamingo characters Kerry, Terry and Cherry generating above-average recall and brand linkage scores for Very.
Very's flamingo campaign represents an emotional differentiation strategy in the competitive UK online retail market. Rather than leading on product range or price, 'Let's Make It Sparkle' positions Very as a source of joy and colour, directly addressing a market in which Kantar identifies emotional response as a primary driver of Christmas advertising effectiveness.
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