A new dawn in lawn
In Pakistan, there are five seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Lawn. For many people, lawn season is that time of the year when, just like you dread load-shedding in summer and gas-shedding in winter, you can’t wait for life to be discovered on another planet (and, of course, for there to be affordable inter-planetary travel). For others, it’s like chaand raat… only better.
Seasonal madness
If you’re here to learn something new and revolutionary about horticulture and landscaping, we advise you to leave this page. The subject of this article is a fabric that is insanely popular in the Sub-Continent, especially at this time of the year.
Over the last couple of years, lawn season has been synonymous with mass hysteria among women. More recently, lawn season has resulted in a surge of viral videos showing just how far some women are willing to go for a piece of clothing (case in point: The Sapphire lawn stampede). The videos, which were initially amusing, quickly became a source of second-hand embarrassment. After all, seeing your mothers and sisters recreate a scene from World War Z is not a pleasant experience. However, this year has been different. Fortunately, this lawn season is making waves for the right reasons.
Shaking things up
One of the first signs foreshadowing the impending lawn season are the billboards and banners – hundreds and thousands of them – plastered all over the country. While that remains unchanged, this year, two giants in the lawn ‘scene’, decided to shake things up and forego the run-of-the-mill photo shoots quintessential of the lawn billboard culture. The brands in question are Nishat Linen and Gul Ahmed, two veterans in the lawn industry, who, with their current marketing campaigns, are showing the rookies how it’s done.
The campaigns
Let’s talk about Nishat Linen first. For its NL You line, Nishat seems to have wanted to accurately represent its target audience – the youth. They wanted their campaign to reflect the spirit of young, Pakistani girls who are fun, independent and fashion-forward; they wanted to create something that was real and relatable.