McDonald's puts emerging Black designers centre stage with Threadsetters zine driving 63% in page readership

Overview

We worked with REVOLT and McDonald's on the Black & Positively Golden "Change of Fashion" campaign — a program backing emerging Black American fashion designers with grants and mentorship, in an industry where Black talent makes up just 7%.

A grant program lives or dies by how many people actually know it exists. McDonald's didn't need another press release. So we created a zine to share the story of the five fashion designers, and the mission behind them, to land with the audience and culture the program was built for. The work had to read like something people choose to open, not branded content they scroll past.

Approach

This audience treats fashion as part of its cultural story, not a catalogue. So we didn't build a standard landing page and slap information on it. We built a beautiful digital magazine — a zine that showcases the designers like the icons they are, and roots the whole thing in the texture of Black fashion history. We created 3D objects and textures to emulate real denim and craftsmanship: polaroids, hand-drawn notes, the scrapbook feel of a designer's sketchbook, to show the behind-the-scenes and the stories behind the designers themselves. The goal was to make it worth reading on its own, so the mission travels through culture instead of feeling like advertising.

We built the zine in three parts. The Future of Fashion opens with the designers in their own words on what shapes their style. Threadsetters 101 sets the history — the lineage of Black creativity in denim and street style evolution. Meet the Threadsetters gives each of the five fashion designers a full profile spread: their story and the work itself, from Nia Thomas's Resort Ready Knitwear to the rest of the cohort.

Then we built the identity around it. The Threadsetters campaign branding, the typography, and the colour stayed heavily tied to McDonald's brand guidelines. And we took it off the page into the room: social assets to drive attention, physical event merchandising, and event wayfinding, so the program showed up the same way in person as it did online. All of it built responsive, for how this audience actually reads — interactive, visual, and on their phones.

Outcomes

Over the campaign period, the zine pulled 601K+ readers and more than 3 million page views. People didn't just land and leave. Across 8 sections, the average reader got through 63% of the digital zine in a single visit, going deep into the immersive stories. And it kept pulling: roughly 1,700 readers and 8,600 page views every single day, sustained across the campaign duration, not a launch-week spike that faded.

A grant program became a place readers chose to spend time in, and be inspired by the journey of Black emerging talent making real moves through their craft.