Seattle Southside Gave Its City 5 Heros That Tourists Can Take Home With Them

Source: LittleBlackBook

Client: Explore Seattle Southside

Campaign: One23West’s Microadventure Mystery Box

What we made: Vinyl Blind Box Figurines

Industry: Travel & Tourism

 The Campaign 

Explore Seattle Southside, formerly the Seattle Southside Regional Tourism Authority, was established in 1999 as the destination marketing organization for SeaTac, Tukwila and Des Moines, the cities near Seattle's airport. It promotes the region to leisure and business travellers and to meeting and event planners, and calls itself the curiously wonderful destination for exploring the Pacific Northwest. It's funded by a Tourism Promotion Area assessment, and has been named one of Washington State's Top 100 Best Workplaces four years running, from 2023 to 2026.

Seattle Southside has a stopover problem. Plenty of travelers pass through the area around Seattle's airport on their way to somewhere more famous, and never find out what's there. When it rebranded in 2023, its stated goal was to get the people already coming through Seattle to take notice of the area and visit. The answer was Curiously Wonderful, a brand built around micro-adventures: small, offbeat outings that fit into a layover or an extra day.

Source: tryspree’s Instagram

The Microadventure Mystery Box takes that idea a step further. The aim was to get first-time and repeat visitors out exploring, with itineraries and savings matched to their interests, and to make the invitation something people would want to keep. That's why it's a collectible. Visitors order a free mystery box at MicroadventureMysteryBox.com. Inside is one of five collectible characters, and nobody knows which until it's open. A QR code on the bottom of the figure unlocks the Our Favorite Things Pass, with buy-one-get-one-free offers at places like The Museum of Flight, the Seattle Chocolate Factory Tour, and Waterland Arcade. Visitors can also enter to win a $1,430 getaway.

And this is how they brought in the "gotta get them all" essence to this campaign.

These 5 characters weren't picked randomly, each one of them meant something.

Each character is a different reason to stop:

  • B. Tea: a bubble-tea-obsessed alien with pearls on his face and a pink straw for an antenna. He leads the Bubble Tea Trail and nods to the Maury Island Incident, an alleged UFO sighting over Puget Sound in 1947.

  • Chomper: a sixgill shark rising out of a ramen bowl, with a burger, a taco and a pizza slice for company. He's the international dining scene.

  • Glider: a harbor seal in aviator goggles, for flight, indoor skydiving and aviation history.

  • Bubbles: a giant Pacific octopus in a go-kart with a golf club and a bowling ball, for the 20+ family attractions.

  • Herb: a giant sloth with a hiking stick, a flower on his head and a bird on his backpack. He covers gardens, trails and birdwatching, and was inspired by a sloth unearthed during construction of SEA Airport in 1961, according to Seattle Southside.

Look closer and the cast is rooted in the place. Sixgill sharks really do visit Puget Sound, and scientists think it may be a nursery for them. Harbor seals are the most common seal there, and giant Pacific octopuses are a diver favourite. The other two come from local lore: the Maury Island story was marked by the Washington State Senate on its 70th anniversary in 2017, and the sloth is a fossil from the airport's own backyard.

What We Made : Mystery Box & Figurines Unique to the Destinations

Our part was turning five flat illustrations into five things you can hold.

The illustrations came from Polyester studio, delivered as final art. Alongside a line-up, every character got a turnaround sheet: five views covering the front, three-quarter angles, both sides and the back. That sheet matters more than it looks. A drawing only has to work from the front, but a figure on a desk gets picked up and turned around. Someone has to decide what the back of an octopus looks like, what's on Herb's backpack, where Chomper's chopsticks poke out, before anyone sculpts a thing.

What they wanted:

What we gave them:

From there, every figure and the box itself start as a colour-matched digital proof. We sculpt, paint, print and produce each one to match. "To match" is the real job: the purple, pink, lime and orange on screen have to come out the same on soft-touch vinyl and on a printed box.

All five characters stand on the same chunky colour-block base, in blue, red and pink. It lets each figure stand on its own, it makes five very different animals read as one set when you line them up, and it echoes the colours on the box. Each figure also has its own little scene: B. Tea is off to space, Herb is up the trail, Bubbles is out on the green, Glider is in the air and Chomper is tucking in.

What they wanted:

What we got them:

The box does its own selling. A bright "Who's inside?" sits on a pink flap, with lime green, orange and blue panels and the cast across the sides, plus a "Collect them all!" line. You can see who you might get. You can't see who you did.

Why we think it works

ONE23WEST's creative lead described the idea as borrowing the thrill of a mystery box and putting it to work for a destination, so that opening the box becomes the first step of the trip. The pull also does the targeting: whichever character you get hands you a different itinerary, so the blind box works like a personality quiz. The foodie, the plane-spotter, the family, the hiker and the boba-and-UFO fan each get their own way in.

It sits on two cultural traditions. The mystery-box craze runs from Japan's gashapon capsule machines to Pop Mart's Labubu. Japan also has a long habit of giving places their own mascots, called yuru-chara, like Kumamon for Kumamoto. Seattle Southside combined the two: a destination mascot, delivered in a blind box.

Source: meili_zzz Instagram

Residents of Seattle Southside also uploaded videos on their socials of them opening these mystery boxes, buying more than one to get on it. It also creates a culture where you can certainly be a tourist in your city. And that's the fun, isn't it?

Source: erika.taste.test Instagram

The collecting instinct also does the work of a repeat-visit campaign. Pulling one character makes you curious about the other four itineraries, and the campaign is aimed at first-time and repeat visitors alike. The figure stays on a desk as a reminder, and the QR code on its base is the way back in.

Want a mystery box that sells a place, a product, and a brand? Get in touch with us.