In 2022, JW Marriott deepened its connections to holistic well-being with the JW Garden — spaces at city and resort hotels offering guests the opportunity to relax, take time apart, and rediscover the world around them. To bring the initiative to life, JW Marriott began a new partnership with designer Lily Kwong.
Overall Objectives:
Raise awareness of JW Marriott as a place for holistic well-being through the lens of the JW Garden.
Design & produce 3 “Halo” JW Gardens
Utilize Lily’s expertise to make the JW Garden as unique, authentic, and relaxing as possible.
Develop a high value partnership with Lily Kwong to build credibility for JW Marriott in the holistic well-being space.
Launch an awareness campaign across social media and digital.
To showcase the importance of the JW Garden, JW Marriott chose to work with Lily Kwong to create 3 examples across the United States.
Lily Kwong is a landscape designer and social media influencer working at the intersection of horticulture, urban design, art, and wellness, with a mission to reconnect people to nature through landscape projects and botanical art installations. This profile made her a natural fit for the launch & partnership — not simply a promoter or consumer, but someone impressively skilled and deeply invested in the process.
By working with Lily, JW Marriott envisioned JW Garden experiences that would succeed in person or on social or digital channels. Whether experiencing the scent of native herbs on property, a post on Lily’s Instagram, or a video shared through promotion, our work with Lily was designed to foster discovery moments in nature and raise awareness of JW Marriott as a place for holistic well-being.
The Campaign
Uniquely reflecting their properties and destinations, the JW Gardens created with Lily for JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, JW Marriott Orlando Bonnet Creek Resort & Spa, and JW Marriott Essex House New York turned out beautifully.
From cacti and native plants in Desert Springs, to a pollinator’s paradise in Orlando, to an explosion of herbs in New York, each garden offered a unique concept and space for guests to step back, reconnect, and engage their senses.
By documenting the creation of each garden from beginning to end, JW Marriott obtained video and still image assets capturing the serene and thoughtful character of these natural spaces.
These assets were the foundation of a campaign shared to the JW Marriott social channels and a new custom landing page, posts from Lily debuting the concept to her own audience, and stories presented through wider digital media.
Charity
The launch of each JW Garden also successfully included a charitable element, sharing garden experiences to the wider community:
In Desert Springs, to the Mojave Desert Land Trust for nursery benches that facilitate growing 1,200 additional desert plants
In Orlando, to the Orlando City Foundation to build community gardens at two elementary schools
In New York City, to the New Garden Fund to support the one-acre teaching garden on Governors Island, a popular field trip destination for NYC schoolchildren.
Media/ PR
Outreach to publications and PR bore fruit as well, with articles on Lily Kwong and the JW Garden appearing in, among others, Vogue, Robb Report, Fast Company, Yahoo News Domino magazine, and Well + Good online. These press clips generated an impressive 698M impressions in total.
Retail
Simultaneous with the campaign’s launch, JW Marriott debuted its Curated by Lily Kwong Herb Garden Kit through the Curated by JW online shop.
With a total social reach of 29.2 M and 698M media impressions, this campaign successfully spread awareness of the JW Garden and holistic well-being, relaying the partnership and positioning of the JW Garden across social media and the press.
In summary, The JW Garden launch showed the beauty of slowing down with nature and taking time to center well-being — worthy of savoring in more ways than one.
