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Zulily Rewrites Its Own Story With Surreal TV Storytelling
Zulily's 'Patio, Karen, Shoes, Tunic, Exploding Eyes' is a 2018 retail film campaign created by Office of Baby that used surreal, comedic narrative vignettes to reposition the brand as a broad lifestyle shopping destination for women, home, pets, and family — far beyond its established identity as a retailer for mothers and young children.
Published in the United States in March 2018, the campaign launched publicly across prime-time cable and network television on March 22 and 23 of that year, according to Clapboard. Office of Baby, the New York-based advertising agency behind the work, simultaneously distributed six-second video extensions across Facebook and Instagram, giving the campaign a cross-platform presence that extended its narrative reach beyond the living room. The campaign comprised five distinct media assets, each a standalone film execution built around the same absurdist creative premise.
Zulily described the campaign as its biggest TV effort to date at the time of launch, per Clapboard. The brand's ambition was explicit: to signal to US shoppers that Zulily had grown well past the kids-and-baby category that defined its early years. Naama Bloom, Zulily's vice president of brand video marketing, stated the company wanted to demonstrate it offered products for the full breadth of family life, as reported by Clapboard. That repositioning impulse gave the creative brief its dramatic tension — a brand attempting to publicly reintroduce itself to a market that thought it already knew what Zulily sold.
The campaign's surreal tone was not decorative. Each execution dramatised the imaginative, impulsive logic of what the strategy termed 'shoppertunistic' behaviour — the spontaneous, discovery-led browsing that the brand compared to scrolling through Pinterest. In the United States, where the retail e-commerce landscape had grown intensely competitive by 2018, that framing positioned Zulily as a platform for joyful, serendipitous discovery rather than deliberate, search-driven purchasing.
Zulily operated in 2018 as a US-focused, mobile-first flash-sale and personalised-shopping retailer, according to Clapboard. Its core challenge was perception: a significant portion of the American shopping public associated the brand exclusively with deals for mothers and infants, an identity that had calcified over years of category-specific marketing. The 2018 campaign was designed to dissolve that association.
The strategic concept at the centre of the work was 'shoppertunistic' behaviour — a coined term describing customers who browse without a fixed purchase intent, open to discovery, and susceptible to imaginative leaps about how a product might transform their life. Office of Baby drew an explicit parallel between this mindset and the experience of browsing Pinterest, a comparison that grounded the surreal creative executions in recognisable consumer psychology. The insight was that Zulily's personalised, curated feed already supported this mode of shopping; the advertising simply needed to make that experience feel exciting and emotionally resonant.
In the United States, the competitive pressure on mid-market retail brands was acute in 2018. Amazon's estimated US e-commerce market share rose from 43.5% in 2017 to 49.1% in 2018, according to Marketplace Pulse. US retail e-commerce sales were projected at approximately $525.69 billion for that year, per eMarketer as cited by Finance Yahoo. Within the online apparel and footwear segment alone — a category directly relevant to Zulily's expanded product range — Bloomberg estimated 2018 sales at approximately $70 billion, with Amazon accounting for roughly 35% of that figure. Against competitors including Amazon and flash-sale rival Rue La La, Zulily's strategic argument was differentiation through emotional experience rather than price or selection alone. The 'shoppertunistic' framing gave that argument a cultural vocabulary.
Director Zach Math helmed all five executions of the campaign, working through production company Caviar Content, as documented by Clapboard. Math's direction gave each film a distinct comedic register — one that balanced domestic realism with sudden, visually absurdist ruptures. The title 'Patio, Karen, Shoes, Tunic, Exploding Eyes' is itself a catalogue of these ruptures: each word names either a product category, a character, or the surreal consequence of a shopper's imaginative 'what if?' fantasy taken to its visual extreme.
Creative direction on the campaign came from a team led by chief creative officer Paul Caiozzo and executive creative director Nathan Frank at Office of Baby, with creative director Megan Sheehan and art director Kelsey Shang shaping the executional detail, per Clapboard. The combination of Caiozzo's conceptual ambition and Math's directorial control produced films that read as miniature character comedies rather than conventional retail advertisements. The surrealism was precise: grounded enough in ordinary domestic life to feel relatable, but escalated far enough to generate genuine surprise.
Post-production was handled by Mack Cut, with editor Erik Laroi and assistant editor Danielle Minch shaping the pacing that made the tonal shifts land, according to Clapboard. Music was composed by Asche and Spencer, whose score supported the comedic rhythm without overwhelming the visual gags. Executive producer Mai Huynh oversaw the agency side of production, while Caviar Content's executive producers Jasper Thomlinson and Michael Sagol managed the production company operation, with producer Brian Etting on set. The six-second social extensions required the same narrative compression applied to the longer television films — a craft challenge that the production pipeline accommodated within the same creative framework.
No verified performance data for 'Patio, Karen, Shoes, Tunic, Exploding Eyes' is publicly available. No measurable social media engagement data, earned media coverage from major trade publications, or independently verified sales impact figures have been documented in connection with the campaign, per Clapboard. No reviews were identified from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious at the time of publication.
Structurally, however, the campaign demonstrates coherent strategic logic. The decision to launch on prime-time cable and network television — Zulily's largest TV investment to that point — signals genuine organisational commitment to the repositioning effort. The simultaneous deployment of six-second social films on Facebook and Instagram reflects an understanding that the target audience in the United States inhabits multiple screens, and that brand-building in retail requires frequency across contexts, not merely a single broadcast moment.
The surrealist creative approach carries inherent risk in a retail context: abstraction can obscure the product and the value proposition. In this campaign, the risk appears managed by anchoring each execution to a recognisable consumer fantasy — the narrative never loses sight of the transaction even as the visual language escalates. The five-asset structure also provides breadth without repetition, a meaningful consideration for a campaign running across extended cable schedules. Clapboard scores 'Patio, Karen, Shoes, Tunic, Exploding Eyes' at 53 out of 100, reflecting competent creative execution and a clear strategic rationale, offset by limited documented cultural traction and the absence of verifiable outcome metrics.
'Patio, Karen, Shoes, Tunic, Exploding Eyes' is a 2018 retail film campaign created by Office of Baby for Zulily. It launched across US prime-time television in March 2018 and used surreal, comedic vignettes to reposition Zulily as a broad lifestyle retailer beyond its earlier identity as a destination for mothers and young children.
Office of Baby, a New York-based advertising agency, created the campaign. The creative team was led by chief creative officer Paul Caiozzo and executive creative director Nathan Frank, with creative director Megan Sheehan and art director Kelsey Shang, as documented by Clapboard. Director Zach Math at Caviar Content helmed the film productions.
The campaign was built around the concept of 'shoppertunistic' behaviour — spontaneous, discovery-led browsing comparable to scrolling Pinterest. Office of Baby used this insight to reframe Zulily as a platform for joyful, serendipitous shopping discovery, differentiating the brand from search-driven competitors in the United States retail market.
The campaign launched publicly in the United States on March 22 and 23, 2018, per Clapboard. Primary media was prime-time cable and network television. Office of Baby also distributed six-second video executions on Facebook and Instagram simultaneously, extending the campaign's narrative reach across multiple platforms.
Clapboard scores the campaign 53 out of 100. The rating reflects a coherent creative strategy and competent surrealist execution across five film assets, offset by limited documented cultural traction, no identified major trade press coverage, and an absence of publicly verifiable performance or engagement metrics for the US campaign.
Zulily's campaign responded to Amazon's dominant US e-commerce position — estimated at 49.1% market share in 2018 by Marketplace Pulse — by competing on emotional experience rather than price or selection. The surreal narrative approach differentiated Zulily from search-driven rivals including Amazon and flash-sale competitor Rue La La.
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