Helm Creative Studio wins Hermes Award for holiday gifting campaign

Helm Creative Studio won a 2025 Hermes Creative Award for its custom holiday advent calendar, a client-gifting campaign built around local Philadelphia makers and handwritten notes. The win highlights the agency’s push to position personal, human-made creative work as a differentiator in marketing.

Why it matters: - The award recognizes a client-gifting campaign that turned holiday packaging into a branded experience centered on local businesses, craftsmanship and personal connection. - Helm Creative Studio says the win validates its “Strategically Human” approach, which emphasizes human-made creative work over AI-driven production. - The campaign also helped establish a new Strategic Client Gifting category within the Hermes Creative Awards’ Marketing Collateral & Brand Assets division.

What happened: - Helm Creative Studio announced that it won a Hermes Creative Award for its 2025 holiday advent calendar campaign, “There’s No Place Like Helm for the Holidays.” - The Hermes Creative Awards are an international competition that recognizes work in marketing and communications. - The award was in the Strategic Client Gifting category. - Helm helped create that category within the awards program. - The campaign was designed and illustrated in-house by Helm’s team.

The details: - The holiday gift was a custom-built box with 12 drawers. - Each drawer held a curated item from a local Philadelphia business, chef or vendor. - Clients opened one drawer per day in the lead-up to the holidays. - Each item came with an original note explaining why Helm chose it. - Helm assembled the boxes by hand. - The package included a matching holiday card with handwritten messages from Helm’s founders and team. - The shipment also used an originally illustrated shipping box. - More than 100 clients and collaborators received the advent calendar. - Ashlee Hollis, president and founder of Helm Creative Studio, said the award honors a category the agency helped create and reflects the impact of products chosen and packed by real people. - Hollis said the campaign became a celebration of human connection because it featured products from vendors and individuals Helm has worked with for years.

Between the lines: - The campaign is a branding move as much as a holiday gesture. - Helm is using a physical, personalized gift to reinforce its positioning around human-centered creativity and social impact. - The emphasis on local makers and handwritten notes gives the campaign a community-facing angle that extends beyond client retention.

What’s next: - Helm is likely to keep using human-centered storytelling as a core part of its creative services pitch. - The agency says its mission is to make creativity and social impact the industry standard while valuing people over production. - Helm continues to operate from Philadelphia through its Qualified Production Facility, The Story Factory.

The bottom line: - Helm’s award shows that a well-crafted physical gift can still carry strategic weight in a digital-first marketing world.