The story behind that Bon Iver canned salmon

For artists like Ariana Grande or Lady Gaga, brand collabs tied to album releases are to be expected. That hasn’t been the case for indie band Bon Iver—until now.

For SABLE, fABLE, the latest album from Bon Iver that was released this month, frontman Justin Vernon hosted a basketball tournament, did interviews, and greenlit a slew of brand collabs with small businesses, including tinned-fish company Fishwife on a can of Bon Iver-branded smoked salmon—a product that has been called, among other things, “the weirdest brand collab ever.”

It’s an about-face from past promotions for Bon Iver’s albums, the first of which was released in 2008, which have historically been just about as subdued as the mysterious and private persona Vernon has embodied in his music.

“He was famously always very camera-shy,” Robby Morris, VP of creative marketing at Secretly Group, which oversees Bon Iver’s label, Jagjaguwar, said. “It was always a good artistic challenge for us because we had to figure out ways to work around him not wanting to do tons of press and him not wanting to put his face on things.”

With no tour on the horizon, Morris said SABLE, fABLE’s release was an opportunity for Vernon to be more involved and try something new—which, in this case, meant working with more than 25 different partners to help entertain fans and nonfans alike. And no, don’t consider it a cash grab. “We definitely did not enter any of these partnerships to make money, and we have not made any money,” Morris said. “We may have actually lost some money on some of this.”

What they may have lost in budget was, however, regained in community engagement and awareness via word-of-mouth marketing, which Morris said is continuing to climb. “We’re seeing the results of this total 180, going from the subdued to the very in-your-face,” he said. “So far, we think it’s working.”

For salmon, forever ago

It all started with a goal to “spread the gospel of, ‘It’s not pink, it’s salmon,’” Morris said, which was borne out of Vernon’s insistence that the album cover is not, in fact, pink. With brand partnerships, there were plenty of opportunities beyond selling tinned salmon, including salmon-colored roses with the Brooklyn-based floral boutique Rosehip Social, salmon-colored notebooks with stationary brand Field Notes, and a salmon-colored old fashioned with Settle Down Tavern in Vernon’s native Wisconsin.

The small-business collabs “took on a bit of a life of its own,” Morris acknowledged, with 10 North American and 14 international brand and restaurant partners in total.

Amanda Colbenson, creative and experiential marketing director at Secretly Group, who also worked on the album promotion, said each collab came from a desire to display “tongue-in-cheekiness” rather than deliver on any financial ROI.

“We weren’t going into this like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna sell so many salmon-colored pastries, we’re gonna be millionaires,’” she said. “It was like, ‘What is a funny thing we could do that’s unexpected where we tap into the local Bon Iver community globally?’”

“Messing with the formula”

Some of the SABLE, fABLE promotion strategies borrowed from past album marketing successes. When Morris began working with Bon Iver on the 2019 album I,I, Jagjaguwar put its effort into listening events for fans, which ended up being such a success for community engagement that they hosted another round of listening parties called “fABLE sPACEs” this time around.

The basketball tournament, on the other hand, was brand-new. Jagjaguwar and Bon Iver presented an event called “Live Inside This State Fair” in LA earlier this month, which featured not only games (that Vernon played in), but also food vendors and raffles benefiting Bon Iver’s 2 A Billion campaign for gender equity.

“Instead of playing a secret show somewhere, why not host a basketball tournament with your friends and invite fans along to drink some free iced coffee and eat some hamburgers and listen to a brass band?” Morris said. “It’s messing with the formula a bit.”

There was a risk in trying a variety of new strategies and not having one cohesive campaign narrative, Colbenson said. (Safe to say that some online didn’t follow the correlation between the album and Vernon’s hooping skills.)

“The question was, ‘Will people get it?’” she said. “Will they embrace it even though it isn’t a traditional way of marketing something or telling a story?”

Even though SABLE, fABLE has had a more commercial rollout than albums past, Colbenson said she’s optimistic that it hasn’t alienated longtime listeners. “Hopefully fans see it’s not like, ‘Oh, he’s selling out. He’s got his Field Notes now,’’ she said. “It really is just having fun with all of this.”

Speaking of sell-outs, though, the Fishwife and Todd Snyder collabs both did—as did the limited-edition Earl of East candle listed on Bon Iver’s webstore. Based on that, online chatter, and streaming numbers (SABLE, fABLE debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200), Morris said the strategy overall was a risk worth taking.

“I’ve seen people who aren’t big fans of Bon Iver talking about these things that we’re doing—just the sheer amount of press and interest we’ve gotten…has been great,” he said. “We’re seeing better, way better streaming numbers than we did for the last record.”