From Seasonal to Seasonless.
Skip the Skirt, Pot Your Tree.
Transforming summer garden tools into winter essentials through sensory storytelling, remote creative direction, and the kind of Pinterest optimization that moves product.
A spring planter becomes the season's focal point.
Garden Planters as Holiday Essentials
LBE Design spent years perfecting spring and summer planters. Their customers loved them. Then came winter, and inventory sat still. The business was locked into seasonality, and the brand thrived only half the year. The challenge wasn't creating new product. It was repositioning what already existed into a retail season that trditionally moves the most units.
The assignment: shoot, style, and strategize a complete holiday campaign that would make customers see their favorite spring planters as essential winter decor. Not holiday-themed planters. Not seasonal products. The actual bestsellers, reframed through a holiday lens. Rosemary. Ivy. Potted trees. Things already growing in customer gardens, now styled for entertaining, gifting, and transforming indoor and outdoor spaces into warm, inviting seasonal moments.
The results needed to live everywhere. Photography for social. Email campaigns for nurture. Pinterest pins designed for the high-intent holiday shopper. And a blog post that would rank for "holiday entertaining" searches.
Lights wrapped around cacti and succulents. Minimal, surprising, sellable.
Remote Direction Meets In-Person Craft
The shoot spanned two locations. The previously shot Topanga Canyon location provided raw, natural wood backgrounds and diffused light. Jessica's home and studio offered clean white walls and controlled styling flexibility. Jessica Alexander led photography on set. Catherine Wright directed in-person and remotely, sending detailed shot lists, Pinterest moodboards, and real-time adjustments via phone. The workflow was hybrid: in-person execution, remote vision.
Every shot was built around a single idea: these planters are year-round residents of curated spaces, not seasonal decorations. A pot of rosemary doesn't need holiday wrapping. It needs smart styling. Cocktails with fresh sprigs. Candlelit dinner tables with ivy running across the length. Bar carts elevated with greenery instead of just spirits.
Between Pinterest moodboards and collaborative shot lists, we were able to establish and set tone and proportion. This combination of remote strategy and on-set execution ensured consistency across a shoot that spanned two locations with different styles.
Bar carts become canvases for greenery.
The shot lists weren't just directions. They were visual blueprints that let the photographer know exactly what the final image needed to communicate.Catherine Wright, Creative Direction
Dining tables styled with planters and candlelight.
Two Locations, One Vision
Both environments told the same story: these are designed objects, and they deserve to be styled like it.
Jessica Alexander's eye for light and composition combined with Catherine Wright's remote direction to ensure every frame hit the brief. Rosemary cocktails got close-ups showing detail and the fresh green needles. The bar cart shot locked in with three perfectly placed pots and exactly the right amount of negative space. The dining table came together with layered candles, fresh sprigs, and a sense of abundance that felt earned, not forced.
Cocktails built around the product itself.
Ivy runs the length of the table. Unexpected. Luxe. On-brand.
From Campaign to Year-Round Revenue
The campaign launched across various channels. Social Media carried the full lifestyle shots. Email campaigns took subscribers through the entertaining story: here's what's possible if you start with the right planter. Pinterest got optimized, keyword-rich pins designed to capture shoppers searching "holiday entertaining" and "winter plants for indoors." And then came the blog post.
The blog post is still the brand's top traffic driver to date. It ranked for high-intent search terms and introduced new customers to the site. The combination of sensory writing, stunning photography, and a clear through-line from product to lifestyle to entertaining moments proved that education-led content outperforms product pushes.
On Pinterest, the campaign produced some of the most popular pins. The bar cart image. The dining table. The cocktail. Each one drove consistent clicks, saves, and repins. But the real win was behavioral: customers started viewing planters as year-round investments, not seasonal purchases. Spring and summer never stopped selling. But winter, suddenly, moved too.
Read the full story: Skip the Skirt, Pot Your Tree on the LBE Design Journal
Even washrooms can become stages for holiday storytelling.