How Teenage Fanfic Drove Vera Bradley's Y2K Nostalgia Play

With Devon Sawa on board, it's like 2002 all over again

Since 1982, Vera Bradley has helped women own and celebrate their personal style. After winning the business this year, Callen has helped usher in a new era by recalling the best of the brand from the ’90s and aughts. By tapping into the nostalgia of youth, when fun was the priority and anything was possible, VB is enjoying a renaissance, reminding those girls—now all grown up—that fun never goes out of style.

When they got their first Vera Bradley bags, our millennial customers were developing their sense of self and fashion by picking bright patterns that spoke to them. They were unabashedly full of personality, and owned it. We wanted to remind them of who they were when they first chose the VB pattern that spoke to their soul. They were earnest, cringe, free, brave, optimistic, hilarious, romantic and endearingly naive.

This kind of girl was also learning to express herself online in the early ’00s, drawn to sites like Xanga and Livejournal as places to pour out all those big feelings. Which she did. Very publicly.

The pop culture of the time leaked into this creative expression, leading to endless fan fiction about teenage heartthrobs, from Hanson to JTT, all written by innocent 14-year olds. Their fantasies about romance and adulthood weren’t based on experience or reality. But every girl dreams about their celebrity crush choosing them—and celeb crushes are eternal.

There are so many emotional, cultural touch-points around y2k for millennial women. It was our job to make Vera Bradley bags conduits for those memories.

Turning back the pages and the years

When your mission is to get millennial women excited again about the bags they loved from their younger years, you’re bound to find yourself in the dial-up-internet/pink-iMac days of yore. But anyone can make a nostalgia play. What makes it worthwhile is a direct, authentic connection between the brand and the era they’re owning.

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So, we went straight to the source: girly fan fiction blogs from the early ’00s. All we needed was real y2k fanfic, the girl (now woman) who wrote it and the heartthrob she was obsessed with.

We found a real girl named Kristen’s Devon Sawa fanfic from 2002. Twenty-three years later, we transformed her youthful fantasies into a short film–starring a now 40-year-old Kristen and 46-year-old Devon as their teenage selves—just as she imagined them when she was 14. (It took very little convincing to get both Kristen and Devon on board.)

Next, we needed a director who understood early aughts yearning. We partnered with Eva Michon, represented by Native Content, to ensure the dreamy, silly world we created was synched to the time in which it was written. She was able to turn Kristen into an actress—and take Devon back to his Teen Beat heartthrob era.

It was the most fun any of us ever had on set. What’s not to love when you have clients green-lighting not just an ad, but a short film adaptation of y2k fanfic?

Our clients at Vera Bradley made our jobs both easier and harder. We never had trouble selling in ideas–we just had our own (and our clients’) high standards for great work to live up to.

Once they saw this idea, however, VB was sold. They understood we had to harness the power of y2k and girlhood nostalgia–and that this approach was the most surprising and delightful way to do it.

Looking back, we’ve reinforced our beliefs around great work: know your audience and make something that feels like a gift to them. Reward them for loving you. Fear can never lead your work. And if it’s stupid-smart–it’s always worth making.

Especially if it’s making one teenage girl’s fanfic fantasy come true, 23 years later. And getting to meet the star of Casper.