Bad news for grinches who still hate ugly holiday sweaters despite their newfound ironic popularity: Budweiser U.K. is adding some charm to the practice of capitalizing on them.
The beer brand has created a "Knitbot"—what it calls a tweet-powered knitting machine—to knit ugly sweaters for designated drivers. Every tweet tagged with the hashtag #jumpersfordes (jumper being British for sweater, and des being short for designated drivers) causes the machine to knit a little more. Everything about this—the grasping for relevance in social media, the uninvited participation in a tradition not directly connected to any brand—should be annoying. But it's hard to argue against celebrating non-drunk-drivers. People always get sloppy wasted during the holidays, after all, so why not foster good will—and look less mercenary—by focusing on the chaperones?
A quick Twitter search for #jumpersfordes returns only a few dozen mentions since Nov. 27. Now, the brand plans to hand out the sweaters to actual designated drivers via a contest on its Facebook page. Sure, it's not the first holiday campaign to tie in Twitter, knitting and wooly giveaways. But the campaign's real problem is that the sweaters aren't near ugly enough. Coke Zero's are way worse.
Via Design Taxi.