Unilever’s Seventh Generation has chosen Mother New York as its creative agency of record as the brand looks to recover from a bumpy ride since the pandemic.

Mother will lead a repositioning and a new campaign for the brand, which was acquired by Unilever in 2016 and for many years grew rapidly, even expanding globally in 2019. Mother will handle a campaign set to break in April that will likely be the brand’s biggest media investment since before the pandemic.

“The time period post COVID has been really tricky,” said Alison Whritenour, CEO of Seventh Generation since July of 2021 and a 12-year veteran of the brand’s marketing. “We had some of our highest record growth in 2020, because we participate in cleaning categories. And then the bottom kind of fell out in 2021. That really sent us back to the drawing board on who we want to be in the world.”

That includes examining what categories Seventh Generation should compete in, how it markets and where. As of the end of this year, Seventh Generation is pulling out of global markets to concentrate on turning its U.S. business around.

Because of the pandemic, Whritenour said, “We grew in all the wrong places. We saw the exponential growth in categories like paper and cleaners, which aren’t core categories to our business, have the weakest supply chains and, honestly, are the least appealing financially for us. By focusing in those areas, I think we also took our eye off the ball in the most strategic places like laundry and dish [soaps]. We emerged with a very broken supply chain, so everything had to be rebuilt.”

Seventh Generation is on a better path now. “We’ve been on that ride and survived it,” Whritenour said. It remains the leading green brand in the U.S., which she said, “is exactly where we want to be.” The green products category broadly continues to grow at rates of more than 11% annually in the U.S.

Now, she said, “We’re headed into a much brighter time period and want the right partners on the journey in order to do that.”

This is Mother’s first assignment for Unilever in the U.S., though the agency has worked for the packaged-goods giant previously in the U.K. Opinionated, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, previously handled Seventh Generation, but had not done work for the brand in over a year; the account was vacant when the company launched an agency review earlier this year. Contenders were not disclosed.

Mother was a good fit in terms of alignment of values, Whritenour said. “What stood out to me from day one was that Mother is a company that’s trying to make their children proud. We’re on a mission to nurture the health of the next seven generations. And so we both came into this with ideas that were much bigger than our individual selves.”

Mother also stood out for taking the Clean Creatives Pledge, she said. “Our agency partners must share the same value of believing in a fossil-free world.”

“During the pitch process, there was a connection,” said Teri Brady, managing director of Mother, New York. “We felt like we were coming from the same place from a values perspective, and we pushed them with some provocative strategies and creative.”

The assignment includes brand strategy, repositioning, a new campaign, new visuals and new design system, Brady said.

“We talked about the green category and the tropes around it,” she said. “I think we built a compelling argument for them to break through the sea of sameness in the category.”

That will all play out in April, which is fortuitously both Earth Month and the time when retailers generally reset their shelves for household products, Whritenour said.