Sometimes the best projects are the ones that take a little time to simmer. Last autumn, the team at Tin Man Comms reached out to us with an ambitious concept: bringing professional pumpkin carving directly into Tesco stores. The idea was to offer shoppers beautifully pre-carved, professional pumpkins to take the stress and mess out of Halloween. With timelines tight last year, there wasn’t quite enough runway to bring the vision to life, so when they came back to us this season ready to roll, we jumped straight into action.
Working alongside Tin Man Comms and Tesco, our task was twofold: create 4 show-stopping PR photo worthy pumpkins highlighting the biggest cultural moments of the year, and translate one of the designs into an accessible design for live in-store carving across the UK.
Pumpkin Carving the Year’s Biggest Pop Culture Moments
Tin Man came to us with an exciting brief based on consumer research into the nation’s most memorable cultural highlights. They commissioned us to design and carve a bespoke collection of pop culture pumpkins for their national press campaign:
● The Solar Eclipse: A celestial design celebrating the rare astronomical event that gripped the nation, complete with viewers sporting protective eclipse glasses.
● The Summer of Football / World Cup: Capturing the communal euphoria of living rooms, pubs, and fan zones coming together for the summer tournament.
● The Bayeux Tapestry: Marking the monumental loan of the 950-year-old embroidery to the UK, translated meticulously into delicate, medieval relief work.
● Artemis II Lunar Mission: A dynamic space rocket carving honouring NASA’s mission back to the Moon and the nation’s fascination with space exploration.
Once the pumpkins were finished, Hannah from Tin Man Comms joined Jamie in the studio to shoot the hero photography and press assets, ensuring the lighting brought out all the depth, translucency, and detail carved into each gourd
From High-Detail Studio Pumpkin Art to Live In-Store Carving
For the campaign’s retail rollout, Tesco wanted their shoppers to walk away with something truly unique without the hassle of carving at home. They asked us to adapt one of our hero studio carvings into a clean, reproducible design that could be carved live by professional artists stationed inside Tesco Extra stores nationwide.
The chosen one was The Solar Eclipse. We simplified the composition into a striking, high-impact vector template of the eclipse. This allowed the Tesco pumpkin carvers to deliver this live at store pop-ups while shoppers queued to pick up their limited-edition, complimentary Halloween centrepiece.
Morning TV Portraits
To kick off the media blitz on morning television, Tin Man also asked us to sculpt two high-profile portrait pumpkins for broadcast: the beloved This Morning presenting duo, Dermot O’Leary and Sian Welby.
Carving recognisable celebrity likenesses for daytime TV brings a unique set of lighting challenges. Studio sets are flooded with bright key lights that can easily wash out standard translucent pumpkin carvings. To ensure the features looked sharp both under blinding studio rigs and in dimly lit evening displays, we developed the portraits using clean, graphic vector line art and varying relief depths. The faces remained unmistakably crisp on high-definition television cameras.
Seeing a campaign built from a studio concept into national press coverage, national morning TV, and then carrying through into stores where pumpkin carvers (not from the Sand In Your Eye team) carved them live for people, was brilliant to be part of. Huge thanks to the creative team at Tin Man Comms for bringing us on board and to Tesco for letting us share our proper pumpkin craftsmanship with their pop culture pumpkins and Breakfast TV portraits.
