For All Adventures

Per Apricoat’s advertising, I’m led to believe that the company is courting two customer types.

1. Outdoor adventurers:

2. City-dwelling tech hipsters:

But I really feel like they’re missing out on a key demographic: dweeby middle-aged suburbanites. Which is why I wrote up this little ad for them.

Shot One: We see a man putting on a beanie and an Apricoat Adventure jacket. A slow pan out reveals he’s wearing pajama pants.

Shot Two: We see the man walking resolutely down his driveway. It’s a brisk late fall, early winter morning, perfect for a nice bit of cardio. But he only goes as far as his mailbox. From it, he retrieves his mail: roughly seven flyers for state senate candidates.

Shot Three: Still in pajama pants, the man rakes leaves. As he works, we can see him flinch, indicating that just the movement of hunching over has tweaked something in his back. He tries to play it off as nothing so as not to alarm the elderly couple walking by on the sidewalk.

Shot Four: The man, still in his adventure jacket, has raked up a sizable pile. Next to the pile is a lawn and leaf bag. The man scratches his head, unsure of what to do next. Eventually, he gets a second rake, and using it along with the first rake like a set of claws, picks up some leaves. He loses most in the transfer. The same old couple walks by going the other way. They avoid eye contact.

Shot Five: The man spreads the leaves back out and mulches them with his mower.

Shot Six: It’s later in the day and raining. The man walks into the grocery store, the Apricoat keeping him dry.

Shot Seven: In the middle of an aisle, the man wears an expression of extreme concentration as he looks from a package of “soft” toilet paper rolls to a package of “strong” toilet paper rolls and back again. He appears utterly unsure of which to purchase. A bead of sweat forms on his forehead.

Shot eight: Back at home, at the front door, the man sets the groceries down to get his keys. He checks each of the Apricoat’s inner and outer pockets but cannot find them. He takes out his phone and sends a text.

Shot Nine: His friend, who has a set for occasional cat-sitting, pulls up in his car to unlock the door. The man tries to laugh about it, but you can tell from the look on the friend’s face that this is not the first time this has happened.

Shot Ten: Inside, with grocery bags all around him in the kitchen, the man reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out the keys. He shakes his head.

Shot Eleven: The rain has stopped. Wearing the Apricoat again, the man sits out on his deck with a warm cup of coffee and a laptop, trying to get some work done. On the screen, we see him typing up copy for Apricoat, but the word processor keeps autocorrecting it to Apricot. The man sighs.

And that’s it! Apricoat, if you like it, get at me!