If only this happened in every supermarket!

“Wow, never did I expect to get an email from Ritchies IGA boss Fred Harrison!”

If you work at an ad agency, digital firm or web design agency in Melbourne (or around the world for that matter), Christmas time is the best time to flex those creative digital muscles to show off your creative talents whilst making a difference outside of the usual daily grind.

Each Christmas, we celebrate a little differently. Rejecting being “average” is part of our business mantra here at Chromatix. And this Christmas rather than sending bottles of wine and Christmas cards to our clients (we love ya still!), we spent the money on someone else. Doing things differently isn’t always going to work. You don’t have the safety of following a well-worn path, and you could easily fail.

For example, we have a policy of free lunch Fridays. Each member of our web team – in fact even each work experience student – knows not to bring lunch on the last day of the week. It’s not cheap, but it’s one tradition that makes Chromatix a great family to work with. And if we hit difficulty in the future, we’re not going to be stingy. Friday lunches don’t get canned. If we do something well, we like to share it. And if we’re going to go down, let’s die in style.

This Christmas our idea of something different came together from the tons of inspirational digital clips we see online, all the time. Watching the clips makes us feel good, but we wanted to take that further. So we came up with this crazy idea to go and pay for others groceries (you can see what happened above!). We haven’t worked with any supermarkets before, so we started with someone we felt we knew: seeing Ritchies IGA chief Fred Harrison on TV made us feel warm and welcomed into a supermarket chain that cares about the community it serves. IGA seemed to be a good fit for us and we thought they might understand what we wanted to do. We gave them a call out of the blue and much to our astonishment, rather than getting passed to gatekeeper after gatekeeper, we were soon on the phone with CFO Mal Cameron. A few calls later, it was all organised and we were booked in to visit the guys at Ritchies IGA Bentleigh. (See what happened – watch the video above if you haven’t already!)

People thought it was an IGA promotion, they wondered where they had to sign, and the cheeky ones wished they had bought more! But once the gift receivers realised this really was a gift without strings, it brought a smile to their face that likely lasted the rest of the day. These giftees will probably remember that feeling for years. IGA loved it. Ritchies CFO Mal Cameron said it brought a smile to his and his wife’s faces, and “when it’s all said and done, you don’t need much more than that in this busy world.” And as Fred Harrison simply put it: “Great message, mighty effort.” Can we encourage you too: to make the world brighter for the people you meet. P.S. A HUGE thanks to Steve, Jenny and all the staff at IGA Bentleigh East for allowing us to take over!