Follow the Bear! Hofmeister Beer Commercial

Follow the Bear… 🐻🍺💛 I had the fun job of getting to design the new look for George the Hofmeister beer Bear! 🐻

Working with #hofmeister, the team brave spark london & our Director Matt.  From the brief, I put together a few ideas. The main one being a peaky-blinders inspired outfit, baker boy hat, neckerchief & waistcoat (in Hofmeister colours). This was the winner! ✨ So the next stage was drafting a pattern for a 8ft animatronic bear! 😳🐻✂️

I got to go and meet the bear down at Leavesden Studios and measure him up! He was massive - also the proportions of an 8ft animatronic bear are obviously completely different to that of a human. I only had this one opportunity to measure and fit the bear before the shoot day. Not ideal but these situations are set to test us…right!?

I just took really comprehensive measurements ( psst.. if you need it, you can download my measurement sheet for free! Click here) so I could go away and acurrately draft the pattern. I also had to workout the size of our baker boy hat - as any human sizes option looked ridiculously small. My Milliner wasn’t able to be at the fitting, so again I took measurements and photos and used the human sized hats I had as visual references.

I absolutely adore fabric shopping anyway, but its always REALLY fun when its so character led. Obviously the brand colours are a key part of finding the right fabric. I had suggested some form of yellow/mustard check - Ironically sourcing that was harder than one might think. I found a few options, but the winner was a beautiful mustard & brown checkered fabric in a wool. It just worked perfectly for the brand & the look. Then I came across a fab washed denim for the cap. I drafted in the millinery skills of karl dieterich (who also happens to be my trusted assistant as well as a fab Milliner) to bring my hat design to life. 🧢🎩🎓

I had to be clever with the back of the waistcoat. I needed a some stretch, so we could attempt to give the bear a waist, and for the waistcoat to shape the bear perfectly, it needed to have some movement for the puppeteer inside as well as all the tech that’s on the actual puppet. So I used a two way stretch lycra in a matching brown. Although tricky in terms of construction of the waistcoat - it worked a treat!

It all came together really well in the end, I was super pleased with the final outfit.

There are images below of the final look as well as the making process! Enjoy!!

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