Video Content + Partner Relations · Hallmark
Mahogany Social
Video for Hallmark’s Mahogany brand, where the creative and the partner relationship were the same job.
Mahogany is Hallmark’s brand for Black consumers, and it carries a weight most seasonal work does not. The cards themselves are written and illustrated with real specificity, so the video around them has to match that register. Get it slightly wrong and it reads as a brand performing warmth rather than a brand that means it.
Across these programs my job sat in two places at once: leading the creative, and holding the relationship with the brand and partner teams whose trust the work depended on. Every piece here shipped in multiple aspect ratios, cut for broadcast and for feed from the same production.
Uplifted and Empowered
A product film that had to do something harder than show cards: it had to let you read them. The line is built on hand-lettering and illustration, and the writing is the product. So the film slows down where a product film usually speeds up, and holds long enough on each card for the words to land.
Shot as an overhead flat-lay on warm ochre, moving through the range in a single continuous logic rather than a montage of cuts. Delivered at 90 and 60 seconds, each in 16:9 and 9:16.
Valentine’s Spot
Where the product films go wide, this one goes close. Real couples, a plum and burgundy palette pulled straight from the card line, and framing tight enough that the performance carries it — a look held a beat too long, a laugh that starts before the line finishes.
The restraint is the idea. Valentine’s advertising defaults to spectacle, and Mahogany’s audience has seen enough of that to discount it. Intimacy reads as true where spectacle reads as sold.
Delivered at 60, 30 and 15 seconds across 16:9 and 9:16, so the same performance could carry a broadcast buy and a feed placement without reshooting.
Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day is the highest-stakes moment in Hallmark’s year, and for Mahogany it is also the moment the brand is most closely read. The work had to hold both.
Product B-roll built natively for social — composed for 4:5 and 9:16 rather than cropped into them, which is the difference between content that sits in a feed and content that visibly used to be something else.
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