“Mizu is a brand that I believe in, and those are always the best to shoot for,” said Los Angeles photographer Adam Moran when we caught up with him about his recent brand narrative series for Mizu, a reusable cup and bottle company. Adam had a vibrant relationship in the past with the founder of the company, Jussi Oksanen. Jussi is a retired professional snowboarder, and Adam was fortunate enough to shoot for him throughout his career. However, this project took them both away from the snow and into the streets of San Francisco.
Mizu hired Adam to handle still images for the campaign while Paintshop LA, a video production company, created a promo video. Amado Stachenfeld of Paintshop lined up the locations and storyboards that would be used for the video and also for Adam’s stills.
Mizu’s goal for the campaign was to demonstrate a new brand direction through depicting a large variety of lifestyles that would have use for their products, moving away from their previous strategy directed towards primarily hiking, camping, and outdoors enthusiasts.
To achieve this market expansion, they decided to work in urban settings, and show people enjoying many different environments and activities, all using the Mizu products.
If we can show that Mizu reusables are there with you for all the fun moments of life in the city, and on little missions around it, then I think we achieved our goal. We wanted the product to always be there of course, but to be naturally embedded and never forced and I think in the end, we were able to make that happen really well.
The biggest challenge the team faced was the volume of content they were attempting to produce in a limited time-frame. With so many locations, they had to keep the shots quick and the production moving. Going from skating in the city to shooting on a ranch with horses to watching the sunset on the top of Mt. Tamalpais, the team never stopped having a good time.
It was one of those shoots where everyone was having a great time and joking the whole way through and I think that fun really shows through in the photos. Moments like those are when you forget it’s work and just get excited to document what’s going on.
So far, the campaign has been a great success. Adam’s images have been used in a lot of Mizu’s marketing lately, being featured on their website, trade show imagery, ads and loads of social media. Adam believes these photos will continue working with their new branding for a while, and looks forward to doing more work with them in the future.
Check out more of Adam’s brand narrative work at adammoran.com!