oVertone x Disney’s Cruella

Turning an iconic cinematic world into an original campaign for color.

Disney’s Cruella arrived with an unmistakable point of view: punk rebellion, high fashion, transformation and a heroine who refused to disappear into the background. For oVertone, a brand built around self-expression through color, the partnership felt natural.

The challenge was making Cruella’s world feel authentically oVertone.

As Senior Art Director, I co-art-directed the collaboration alongside Elise Schmieder, helping shape the campaign’s visual direction and digital expression from concept through final execution. Our internal creative team developed the campaign world from the ground up, creating original photography and a broader visual system around four limited-edition color kits.

ROLE
Senior Art Director / Co-Art Direction

CONTRIBUTIONS
Art Direction / Campaign Concept / Visual Development / Digital Design / Email / Retouching / Video Review / Disney Creative Presentations

TEAM
Elise Schmieder, Co-Art Direction / Shanna Polesovsky, Creative Direction / Jessica Colón, Copy / Saiya Koclanes + Liv Carter, Design / Seth Harrington, Photography / Bailey Evers, Video

Notoriously Ours

Disney brought an instantly recognizable character and visual language to the partnership, but the campaign itself still had to be created.

Beyond the licensed Cruella identity, oVertone’s creative team developed the visual world, original photography and digital campaign expression internally. Rather than recreate the film literally, we pulled from its punk energy, theatrical fashion and defiant attitude, then filtered those elements through oVertone’s own irreverent relationship with color.

The result needed to feel unmistakably connected to Cruella without becoming movie merchandise.

Forget blending in. We were born to stand out.

We’re the rebels. The outcasts. The weirdos.
The ones who push boundaries and color outside the lines.

We’re the underdogs and the anti-heroes, and now is our time to rewrite the rules and redefine fashion, one notoriously bold, Cruella-inspired look at a time.

The collaboration centered on four limited-edition color kits inspired by the characters and looks of the film.

While the product combinations were established before creative development began, our team helped name the kits and presented their positioning and campaign expression directly to Disney.

From there, we built a shared visual system capable of making four individual products feel like parts of the same larger world.

Elise and I co-art-directed the campaign, with Elise leading much of the production and on-set execution while I developed the visual moodboard and helped establish the direction that carried through the final work.

The entire photographic campaign was created specifically for the partnership by oVertone’s team. I remained involved through editing feedback, retouching and video review, helping preserve the campaign’s visual language as the work moved from production into final assets.

Bold color, theatrical styling and punk attitude gave us the connection to Cruella. The photography still needed the confidence, humor and accessibility that made it feel like oVertone.

The collaboration extended well beyond the hero imagery.

I designed the primary launch emails, landing-page creative and key campaign graphics, establishing a visual system that Liv Carter and Saiya Koclanes could extend across follow-up email, social and additional digital executions.

That consistency mattered. Whether someone encountered the collaboration through an inbox, a social post or the oVertone site, the work needed to feel like one campaign rather than a collection of licensed assets.

 The collaboration ultimately carried value beyond the campaign itself.

At the time, oVertone was primarily an ecommerce brand. Internally, the visibility created by the Disney partnership was credited with helping open conversations with Target and Urban Outfitters, both of which later became retail partners.

More importantly for the work, the campaign demonstrated that oVertone’s brand could enter someone else’s cultural universe without losing its own voice.