Workroom Giving Brands Purpose
4 April 2025
Sometimes, brands can save lives.
For our MD, Brigid McMullen, Know Your Lemons Foundation is a public information campaign that has grown into a global charity, that she genuinely loves: “This is a brand that proves medical organisations don’t have to look like medical text books! It’s creativity + passion + purpose. Bold design-thinking driving bold brand-making.”
The idea? When Corrine Ellsworth-Beaumont, a Design PhD student studying in the UK, was compelled to educate the world on the 12 early signs of breast cancer, she didn’t use dry medical diagrams or walls of text.
She chose lemons.
After experimenting with 47 different objects, she found that lemons looked a lot like breasts – they had ‘skin’ and ‘nipples’, and a pip could instantly suggest how a lump might feel, engaging both the senses and memory. Lemons could visually represent lumps, dimpling, and other warning signs – so that anyone, regardless of literacy, could recognise the symptoms. It was a fresh, unexpected visual metaphor and it worked.
The campaign went viral. Since 2017 it has reached 850bn people, training 800m educators and spanning 60+ countries in 34 languages. It smashed fundraising targets by 317% and utilised social media as a tool for global education.
Brigid’s verdict? “A brilliant example of a purposeful start-up which has grown exponentially by firmly putting imagination and bold communications at the heart of the brand.”
What brand do you love?
Workroom Giving Brands Purpose