Woodpecker — Building the digital brand from the ground up, with award-nominated work along the way.

When Will Poho — founder of Moose Knuckles Canada — brought EMWX on at the start of 2021, Woodpecker was a wholesale-first outerwear brand built around major department store placement. Then COVID hit. Retail closed. The entire industry pivoted online overnight, and Woodpecker had no digital infrastructure to pivot into.

The mandate: take Woodpecker from a wholesale-dependent brand into a direct-to-consumer brand with real digital presence, in real time, while the world was still figuring out what online retail in fashion was going to look like.

We didn't just produce content — we built the digital brand from zero. That meant figuring out, season by season, what Woodpecker was supposed to look like online, who it was for, and how to make it feel like itself across every surface.

Brand visibility through cultural placement — We leveraged our network to put Woodpecker coats on local celebrities first, then global ones. The brand started showing up in places it had never lived before — and those placements seeded organic social momentum that paid for itself many times over.

Social content that builds an actual brand — Year over year, we produced the campaign content, evergreen visuals, and social-native media that grew Woodpecker's followers and engagement from a wholesale brand's flat presence into an active digital community.

The full sales engine — All media for the seasonal sales catalogues and line sheets, the website's hero imagery and product photography, and the visual language that holds Woodpecker's wholesale buyers, retail partners, and direct customers in one coherent brand world.

Award-nominated work — One of the campaign films we produced for Woodpecker, featuring Fashion Santa, was nominated for Best Fashion Film of 2022 at the Canadian International Fashion Film Festival (CANIFF) — a formal industry recognition of the work's craft and storytelling at the level of Canada's top-tier fashion production.

Continuous evolution — Every year, the website got rebuilt, refined, and pushed further. Every season, the visual standard got higher. The relationship started as crisis-mode brand-building during COVID and evolved into a sustained creative partnership that's now in its fifth year.

Today, the relationship has shifted from full-AOR retainer into project-based ongoing work — but the partnership continues, and the visual foundation we built in 2021 is still the foundation Woodpecker operates on today.