Brand campaign · Activation · PR · 2024
Flash Pack
The power of friendship.
Amid an angry election.
1 in 2 American adults are affected by loneliness. 73% feel anxious about the political climate. So solo travel company Flash Pack charged us with turning them into the friendship company, growing their brand in America by tackling the divide head-on. One year. Three escalating activations. One repositioned brand.
- 1 in 2American adults affected by loneliness (HHS)
- 73%Of Americans anxious about the political climate (APA)
- 150,000+Friendships fostered by Flash Pack to date
- 80%Of Flashpackers still in touch after their trip
And the small matter of Flash Pack's homepage now opening with five words it had never used before: "We are the friendship company."
The brief
A British solo-travel company. A loneliness epidemic. A growing US market.
Flash Pack had spent a decade quietly building one of the UK's most loved solo-travel brands. 70+ trips, 100,000+ friendships fostered, 80% of customers staying in touch long after their trip ended. A genuine community, with the data to prove it. But growth in America was harder. To US audiences, “solo travel company” sounded like a product. Not a reason to care.
Meanwhile, the US was in the middle of a measurable loneliness epidemic — 1 in 2 American adults affected, New York's own health commissioner had declared it. The country was heading into the most polarised election in living memory. Friendship, on every measurable axis, was in trouble.
The brief: reposition Flash Pack from solo-travel company to the friendship company. Earn that line. Without ever stopping being Flash Pack.
The idea
One brand pivot. Three escalating activations.
Rather than announce the reposition with a press release, we'd prove it with a year-long campaign that put Flash Pack visibly in the business of making friends — not just selling trips that led to them. Three activations, each bigger than the last, each escalating from one man's personal experiment to a national bus tour:
Be My Friend — Flash Pack co-founder Lee Thompson personally takes to the streets of New York to ask complete strangers to be his friend. The Friendship Corner — a free West Village pop-up where two strangers sit, no Wi-Fi, no screens, just conversation cards. The Friendship Bus — a four-city tour through Chicago, DC, Philly, and New York, in the run-up to the election, partnered with When We All Vote.
One brand. Three acts. Same story, told louder each time.
"In my 30s, I realised something: I didn't really have any friends. I was lonely."
The execution
One year. Three acts. Same story, told louder.
We didn't open the campaign with a manifesto. We opened it with Lee Thompson, a piece of cardboard, and the Manhattan subway.
Act 01 · launch
Be My Friend.
One man. One sign. One city.
Lee Thompson, Flash Pack's co-founder, personally took to the streets of New York to ask complete strangers to be his friend. Subway carriages. Grand Central concourse. A cardboard sign reading “Do You Want To Be My Friend?” A friendship-résumé handed out to strangers in the park. A microphone at an open-mic comedy night.
The producer was the director and DoP behind Impractical Jokers, which is to say: the film was good, the rejections were funny, and the surprising number of people who actually did turn up to a bar crawl with a stranger they'd met an hour earlier became the campaign's first proof of concept. The city that never sleeps, as Lee put it, had become the city that never speaks. Until someone asked it to.
Act 02 · grow
The Friendship Corner.
Two chairs. One deck of cards. No Wi-Fi.
The next step was making the friendship-making something you could walk past on a Saturday and choose to enter. The Friendship Corner opened in the West Village on 17 May 2024, deliberately scheduled to span Mental Health Awareness Month and Men's Mental Health Month. The fit-out was almost contrarian: two chairs facing each other, a stack of bespoke conversation cards graded in three levels of escalating vulnerability, and a policy of no Wi-Fi, no screens. Just two strangers and a prompt.
We programmed it for six weeks with local partners who could fill the slow afternoons: the Slow Girl Run Club, No More Lonely Friends, Christopher Street Tours. The press came in waves. The space became the campaign's physical proof-point, photographed by everyone from tourists to Brooklyn Magazine.
Act 03 · scale
The Friendship Bus.
Four cities. Two weeks. One election.
The final act took the conversation to the road. October 2024, two weeks before the presidential election, in the most polarised political climate Americans had ever measured. We wrapped a 50-foot coach in a gradient lifted from a pride flag and a campaign poster (coral → magenta → navy) and toured Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, and New York. Stops in Old Town, Union Market, LOVE Park, and Times Square.
Outside the bus, the team handed out signs: “Stop here for conversation,” “Vote friendship,” “Honk if you want to make friends.” Inside, two strangers and a bespoke deck of conversation cards. Level 1: “What's your go-to karaoke song?” Level 3: “Can you overcome different political beliefs in a friendship?” We partnered with the nonpartisan When We All Vote for voter registration. The hashtag: #VoteFriendship.
PIX11 News covered the Times Square stop live. The bus made the local news in every city it visited. The campaign closed the year with Flash Pack genuinely repositioned: not the solo-travel company that runs friendship trips, but the friendship company that happens to run trips.
The result
A solo-travel company became the friendship company.
The headline outcome was the easiest to overlook and the most lasting one. By the end of 2024, Flash Pack had a credible new positioning that the press could quote, that the public could repeat, and that the company genuinely believed in — not just a tagline that lived above their logo for a quarter.
Today, Flash Pack's media page opens on this sentence: “We are the friendship company, on a mission to create one million new, meaningful friendships by 2030.” A sentence that didn't exist before this campaign. A sentence that is this campaign, distilled. The kind of outcome that doesn't fit neatly into a stats grid, but that justifies a year of work in one line.
The friendship count crossed 150,000 in the year that followed. The Friendship Bus was named one of the year's standout brand activations by TrendHunter. PIX11 ran live coverage in Times Square. Lee Thompson became a recognised voice in the US press on male loneliness. The mission stays the same: a million friendships by 2030. Two-thirds of the way there.
What was said
-
"We are the friendship company, on a mission to create one million new, meaningful friendships by 2030."
Flash Pack — current media page, post-campaign -
"The Friendship Bus is about celebrating what unites us, not what divides us."
Lee Thompson, co-founder — launch press release -
"It sounds like New York is no longer the city that never sleeps, and is now the city that never speaks."
Lee Thompson, co-founder — Be My Friend -
"Friendship and empathy can bridge any divide — we seem to have lost the ability to agree to disagree."
Lee Thompson, co-founder — The Friendship Bus -
"Innovative ways to foster dialogue and social bonds in a politically divided landscape."
TrendHunter -
"Echoing the success of Flash Pack's New York-based Friendship Corner, The Friendship Bus invites participants on board for conversations that transcend political divides."
PRNewswire syndication
The city that never sleeps had become the city that never speaks. So we asked it to.
Credits
- Creative lead
- Lee Price
- Client lead
- Lee Thompson, co-founder & CMO
- Production (Be My Friend)
- Geoff Celis — director, Impractical Jokers team
- PR partner
- W Communications
- Activation partner
- When We All Vote (nonpartisan)
- Local partners (Corner)
- Slow Girl Run Club · No More Lonely Friends · Christopher Street Tours
- Client
- Flash Pack
Next case
LiLo × Allbirds.
Starting the Lohanaissance.