The Ellen Show

Even an icon like Ellen DeGeneres has to market her brand.  And when Ellen’s team at the Ellen DeGeneres Show approached us in 2018 about making the official Ellen Show ugly Christmas sweater for her fans and online store we considered it a tremendous honor.  Ellen is known for giving out gifts to her fans on the show, and when we started to work on the design of the official Ellen Show ugly Christmas sweater we knew that it was going to be an interesting project, because not only did we have to hit a specific delivery deadline, the design we had in mind for the sweater was so ambitious that we weren’t sure we could pull it off.

Collaborating with Ellen’s team, we set out to create something pretty unique; it involved of some pretty extensive graphic design work. With a design that needed continuous revisions, the real challenge for us when it came to making the Ellen custom knit ugly Christmas sweater was in the crafting of a particular series of characters (from scratch), the animation of them, and then the pixelization of them so that the design that would eventually be approved by Ellen’s team would be 100% perfect.

Making the custom-knit Ellen ugly Christmas sweater was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our company, and our team worked day and night on the project. On a strict deadline, two teams at our Commerce Township facility worked on the sweater around the clock when it came to completing all of the complex graphic design work done for the project, but also when it came time to getting the dozens of physical samples mailed out to Ellen’s team as the design evolved; not to mention, the hours of overtime that everyone put in after the design was approved so we could manufacture the actual custom Christmas sweater for the Warner Brothers television talk show and get them delivered on time.

All in all, collaborating with Warner Brothers and The Ellen Show was a great experience;  we not only proved to ourselves that we could successfully push the envelope when it came to our own creativity and production processes with this truly unique ugly holiday sweater,  we also were rewarded by the response our hard work received from Ellen’s team, Ellen herself, and her fans when the custom made ugly Christmas sweater was revealed on television