Stop by an IKEA showroom in the near future and you’re likely to encounter something even more adorable than assemble-it-yourself bed frames and cabinets. The Swedish furniture giant recently partnered with the Animal Lovers League Shelter and the Save Our Street Dogs shelter to help connect Americans with another home essential: a loving pet. It’s always best to adopt a pet, but animal shelters have precious few resources to spread the word about available animals. To help, IKEA is treating shelter dogs to professional photography sessions, then placing their images in popular showrooms to encourage adoption.
Called the ‘Home for Hope’ program, the collaborative effort pairs animal shelters with popular furniture retailers like IKEA to plant the idea of pet adoption in shoppers’ heads. “With a limited budget most animal shelters can only afford to voice their messages using social media. Problem is, the followers are pet lovers and most already own pets. Hence adoption rates are low.”
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To connect with audiences who don’t yet have a furry friend, IKEA takes fetching photographs of homeless dogs, and uses the images to create life-size cardboard cutouts. The still-life images are then set around the IKEA showroom in places you’d expect to see a dog: sitting on the carpet, stretched out on the sofa, and on carpets, and of course, begging at the dinner table. The cutouts provide a clever if not cheesy idea of what it would look like to really live in the room, and the dogs a moment in the spotlight among potential families.
Shoppers can become potential adopters by scanning the codes on each of the cardboard dogs’ collars. A bio and video of each dog can also be found on the Home for Hope website.
+ Home for Hope
via Fast Co. Design
