What a T-Shirt Taught Us About the Campaigning Mindset
On 12 May 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that Britain could become “an island of strangers.”
It was one of those sentences that stays with you. The next day, at Refugee Action's parliamentary reception, it came up in nearly every conversation. By the third or fourth time, a sentence slipped out of my mouth almost as a joke: "Maybe we should make T-shirts."
By the time I left Westminster, I had a clearer idea: a shirt that simply reads "Member of the Island of Strangers". A small, slightly absurd act of reclamation.
What happened next
I brought it to our team at bak. We wrote a short brief, and our designers quickly returned with a few ideas. The one we chose had the phrase in bubble-gum pink, 3D letters. It looked like it belonged to a nostalgic dream world—something between a postcard and a toy advert. It felt right. If we're being cast as outsiders, we might as well turn the island into somewhere you'd want to be.
I got it printed at Snappy Snaps, wore it and had a picture taken. I posted a photo on LinkedIn and Instagram. The response was immediate. People asked where they could buy one. So we set up a small store using Teemill, which makes it easy to sell print-on-demand with minimal waste.
You can find it here: https://store.bakcreative.agency/
What does this really show?
This isn’t a campaign. There was no strategy deck. But something small happened, and we responded. The T-shirt itself is not the point.
What matters more is the mindset: listening carefully to the moment, acting quickly, and allowing for improvisation. It’s not about viral success or perfect outputs. It’s about keeping ideas moving.
We are a small agency. We don’t have departments or a long sign-off chain. That helps. But if a group like ours can go from a thought to a product in under a week, imagine what larger organisations could do with the same spirit of responsiveness.
Not every action has to be large-scale to be meaningful. Sometimes it's enough to leave a trace that says: we noticed. We cared. We tried.
And sometimes, that trace looks like a green and pink T-shirt.
