Jarritos x AFM
Paris Fashion Week Campaign

"A culture-first international campaign built around two brands with deep community roots, one of fashion's biggest stages, and a creative system designed to travel across every channel it touched."

Creative Directed and Produced By: GUB

The Campaign At A Glance

6-Week Timeline

3 Videos: Promo Film, Partnership Video, Paris Recap Reel

1 Campaign Photoshoot

3 Original Songs

1 Street Activation, Paris France

Remote Creative Direction across US and Belgian Production Teams

Multi-City Production: Los Angeles and Paris, France

The Business

1. My Role

2. The Stage

3. The Brief

4.The Strategy

5. The Partners

6. The Production

1. MY ROLE

I served as Creative Director and Producer on the campaign, overseeing the project end-to-end from strategy and concept development through production, delivery, and day-of activation coordination. This included creative direction across all video, photo, and music assets, hiring and managing a Los Angeles production crew and a Belgium-based videographer, and guiding the on-ground Paris team through the activation in real time from the US.

2. THE STAGE

There's one week a year when the entire fashion industry is looking at the same city at the same time.

Each June, the streets of Paris concentrate some of the highest levels of fashion industry attention in the world. Editors, buyers, photographers, artists, and cultural tastemakers converge across Le Marais, the Palais Royal, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The visibility is real. The audience is international. And the standard for what belongs there is high.

For Action Figure Miles, showing up there was a deliberate statement. This was the brand's first major international activation since my time joining the brand. What it brought to Paris was a clearly defined visual universe, a collaborator with over 70 years of cultural heritage, and the creative infrastructure to back both of them up.

3. The BRIEF

Not every partnership starts with a brief. Some start with a conversation.

Rakeem Miles met a Jarritos marketing executive and did what he always does: told his story. He talked about Action Figure Miles, what the brand represented, the universe it was building, and the depth of the narrative behind it. That conversation became the foundation for a collaboration built around Paris Fashion Week, one of the four most significant fashion stages in the world.

The deliverable was a collection built specifically for that moment. A custom Dickies work shirt bearing both the AFM and Jarritos logos rendered in the Action Figure Miles art style, and a t-shirt featuring an original illustration of the AFM character holding a Jarritos bottle. Both pieces were designed to live inside the AFM universe while honoring the visual identity and cultural heritage of Jarritos.

The brief was cultural. Build something that could hold its own on the streets of Paris, represent both brands with authenticity and intention, and develop a campaign ecosystem that could travel before, during, and after the activation.

4. THE STRATEGY

The central creative challenge was one of alignment. Three distinct brand identities, each with their own visual language, cultural context, audience, and history, needed to coexist within a single campaign without any of them losing integrity in the process.

The approach was not to find a neutral midpoint. It was to bring Jarritos and the context of Paris into the AFM universe, rather than building something separate from it. The AFM visual world, its art style, its color palette, its character-driven storytelling, served as the container. The result was a campaign that felt cohesive from the inside out, where every element, the clothing, the music, the photography, the videos, and the activation itself, felt like it had always belonged in the same world.

The color palette was anchored in Jarritos' signature greens and deep earth tones and carried consistently across every creative output. The merch was rendered in the AFM original art style, translating Jarritos' visual identity in a way that was unmistakably both brands at once. The music was written to exist inside the campaign narrative, not alongside it. Every creative decision was made with coherence as the standard.

5. THE PARTNERS

Action Figure Miles

The Los Angeles streetwear brand founded by Rakeem Miles, built around a fictional superhero character and the storytelling universe surrounding him. By the time of the Paris campaign, AFM had secured licensing partnerships with five NBA franchises, national distribution through PacSun, and a three-shoe collaboration with K-Swiss. Paris was the brand's first step onto an international stage.

Jarritos

Founded in Mexico in 1950, Jarritos is one of the most recognizable beverage brands in Latino culture. Known for its naturally flavored sodas and iconic glass bottles, the brand carries genuine meaning for the communities it represents, not as a corporate identity, but as a cultural institution built over generations. Taking Jarritos to Paris Fashion Week was a statement about the reach and relevance of Latino culture on a global stage.

StayNow

StayNow, a travel technology platform leveraging AI for itinerary and booking services, sponsored all flights and accommodations for the AFM team traveling to Paris. Rather than a standard logo placement, StayNow was integrated directly into the campaign's narrative content through a dedicated video asset and a lyrical reference in the music. The partnership was built into the story, not placed around it.

Ezze

Ezze is a live experience platform that powered the real-time streaming of the Paris activation. Viewers watching the livestream could claim exclusive rewards, including bottles of Jarritos and pieces from the AFM x Jarritos collection, shipped directly to them. With a limited run of 25 shirts available through the platform, the activation created a participatory, real-time dimension that extended the Paris street experience to a global audience.

Avirex

Avirex, the New York-born brand known for its flight jackets and military-inspired outerwear, carries specific and well-documented cultural significance in France. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Avirex became deeply embedded in French banlieue culture, worn heavily by artists from the French hip-hop scene and adopted as a symbol of urban identity across the country. Its recent resurgence has brought it back into the center of French streetwear conversation. Stopping at Avirex was a deliberate alignment between the AFM brand and a cultural touchstone that the Paris street audience already understood.

Brooks

Brooks is a premium American performance running brand founded in 1914, with an established retail presence in Paris and a recognized identity in the European athletic market. The stop placed the activation in the context of American athletic heritage, adding a different dimension to the transatlantic story the campaign was telling on the ground.

6. THE PRODUCTION

Directing an international activation without being on the ground requires a specific kind of operational discipline.

I was based in the United States for the duration of the Paris trip. The AFM team was in France. The production crew was split between Los Angeles and Belgium. The time difference was nine hours, and the workflow had to account for all of it.

My day started at 7AM: aligning with Rakeem and the Paris content team on what they would be capturing, then coordinating with the US-based editing and posting team on the incoming content pipeline. As the US moved into evening, Paris was waking up. The Belgium-based videographer and the on-ground team began capturing the activation. I managed asset transfer logistics throughout the Paris day, ensuring footage and photos moved from France to Los Angeles fast enough for editors to begin work when their morning started.

By the time Paris finished for the day, the US team was back online, editing through the material from the previous Paris day, preparing content for US posting hours, and returning finished assets to Rakeem in time for him to post from Paris when he woke up. That cycle repeated every day. It was a 24-hour operation. It ran cleanly because every person on every side of the time zone was trusted, briefed, and aligned before production began.

THE CREATIVE WORK

The Promo Film opened on Rakeem in the subway, dressed in AFM gear, boarding a train to Paris. Once there, the video follows him moving through the city as people celebrate and share Jarritos all around him. Jarritos Man played underneath, with Rakeem narrating the journey in his own words, giving the collaboration a personal frame and making the music and the visual a single unified piece. The video was shot in Los Angeles and produced as a narrative film.

8. CAMPAIGN IMAGERY

The campaign photoshoot was produced in Los Angeles one week before the Paris activation. The set was built around the Jarritos and AFM color palette: dark brown, deep green, and orange, shot against wood panel walls with artificial grass underfoot. Every element was chosen with intention. The Jarritos bottle colors in each frame, the styling, the props, including a vintage Jarritos-branded suitcase, all contributed to a set that functioned as its own complete visual world.

Rakeem anchored the group shots alongside three additional cast members, each holding a different Jarritos flavor, creating natural color variation within a controlled palette. Individual portraits brought editorial weight. A flat lay of the collection against the grass put the product front and center.

The result was a photoshoot that felt completely coherent from the first frame to the last.

9. THE REPRESENTATION

The casting of the campaign photoshoot was a deliberate creative and strategic decision.

Jarritos is a brand with deep roots in Latino culture and a genuine, multi-generational connection to the community it represents. Building campaign imagery around that brand without acknowledging that connection, without making it visible, would have been a failure of both authenticity and respect.

The decision to cast Latino and Latina talent alongside Rakeem reflected a principle that has shaped the AFM approach to collaboration: partnering with a brand means taking on a responsibility to honor the culture that brand represents. Jarritos carries the weight of a community. The imagery needed to reflect that, not as a gesture, but as a genuine act of creative accountability.

It was also the strategically correct decision. The Latino community is Jarritos' largest consumer base. Work that looked past that would have been reaching over the very people who built the brand's meaning. Staying connected to the culture of your collaborator is not only the right creative choice. It is what makes work land with the people it is actually built for.

The Paris Recap Reel was captured entirely on the ground in Paris by a Belgium-based videographer brought in specifically for the activation. The footage documented the van moving through the city, the team working both pop-up stops, Jarritos being handed to pedestrians and drivers in the street, crowd reactions, and the team navigating Paris throughout the day. Swervin played underneath. The brief was real, present, and immediate. The result reflected that.

11. THE MERCH

Two pieces were produced for the Paris activation.

A custom Dickies work shirt in dark chocolate brown, with the AFM logo on the left breast and the Jarritos logo on the right, both rendered in the Action Figure Miles original art style. And a white t-shirt featuring an original illustration of the AFM character holding a Jarritos bottle, drawn in the same visual language that defines the brand.

100 t-shirts. 50 work shirts. 150 totes. All distributed free of charge on the streets of Paris.

12. THE MUSIC

Three original songs were produced specifically for the campaign, each serving a defined role within the creative system.

Jarritos Man was the narrative anchor. Rakeem telling his story in first person, placing himself inside the world of the campaign and giving the collaboration a human voice and a personal frame.

Jarritos Anthem was built for energy. A high-intensity East Coast boom bap record designed to generate the kind of participatory momentum that turns a brand into a cultural moment.

Swervin was the campaign's sonic atmosphere. An instrumental composed to carry the texture and feeling of the Paris footage, melodic and kinetic, built to make the images feel larger without competing with them.

Together, the three records gave the campaign a complete sonic identity that existed across the videos, on social, and in the streets of Paris.

The Ezze Partner Video was a short-form piece produced for Ezze to post on their Instagram, promoting the Paris activation livestream available on their platform. A concise, high-energy twenty second spot built to drive awareness and pull viewers into the live experience on the day of the activation.

14. THE ACTIVATION

On the day of the activation, a van fully wrapped in AFM x Jarritos vinyl drove through the streets of Paris during Men's Fashion Week. Rakeem Miles, who was in Paris for the full week, was on the ground with a team of four flown in from Los Angeles to run the day. Jarritos France provided remote logistical support on the pop-up coordination. The Ezze livestream ran throughout, broadcasting the activation in real time to a global audience who could claim exclusive rewards as the day unfolded.

We distributed merch and free Jarritos bottles from the van and on foot, crossing streets to hand bottles directly to pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights. The street response was immediate and genuine. People ran up to the van. Crowds engaged at both pop-up stops. Those watching on Ezze could participate in real time from anywhere in the world.

The activation made two stops. The first was at Avirex, a brand with documented roots in French banlieue and hip-hop culture whose influence on Paris street identity dates back decades. Stopping there was intentional, a signal to the Paris street audience that AFM understood the culture it was entering. The second was at Brooks, placing the activation in the context of American performance heritage and giving the day a clear transatlantic identity across two distinct expressions of American brand culture.

The activation was designed to be seen, to generate content, and to leave a mark. It did all three.

15. THE IMPACT

The campaign generated strong engagement across four Instagram accounts simultaneously: Jarritos' global account, Jarritos France, Rakeem Miles, and Action Figure Miles. The campaign photoshoot ran as a collab post between AFM and Jarritos' global account, extending the reach of the imagery to Jarritos' full international following. The work received coverage from both US and French press, connecting the two audiences the campaign was built to reach.

For Action Figure Miles, the Jarritos campaign was the brand's most significant international activation since my time joining . It introduced AFM to a Paris audience during Men's Fashion Week, added one of the most culturally significant beverage brands in Latino history to the brand's partner roster, and demonstrated that the AFM universe could travel internationally without losing what made it distinctive.

The campaign extended the brand's footprint outward, past its existing US audience, past the core sneaker market, and onto a genuinely global stage. That was the objective. That was the outcome.

16. PRESS

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