We recently connected with Rachel Fund and Clara Lvoff and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Rachel and Clara, thanks for joining us today. Do you have any key partners or vendors – if so, how’d you find them and start working with them?

In the summer of 2019, we gathered in the auditorium of Miami Ad School, alongside the other incoming students, and watched an orientation video from a former grad. In it she explained the importance of finding your creative partner. Basically, the deal was a good creative duo is made up of an Art Director and a Copywriter who work together in harmony and the pairing could make or break you. Finding someone who aligned in ambition, drive, talent and ability felt like a daunting challenge for about two weeks until we found each other. It clicked. After months of creating student work together it was time to pop the question “want to build our book together?”

That’s where our love story truly begins. And we really do mean love. We loved working together and learning together and before we knew it, we were fielding offers together, and boy did we love that too. But most importantly we became a team in every sense of the word, and found a business partner and best friend that we can’t imagine a future without. As we grow in our careers and within the industry we’ve remained united on all fronts and it has served us well. The best choice we’ve made in advertising so far was each other.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We are a creative duo formed in Miami Florida in 2019. We’ve interned at The Times in Chicago and have been working at GUT Miami since October 2020, first as interns, then as juniors and now as a mid level creative team.

We’re best known for our work at Gut with Philadelphia Cream Cheese; the campaign of The Tax Free Bagel, which launched last April and won two silvers and one bronze Lion at Cannes.

It all began when we discovered that in New York City, home of the bagel and schmear, there’s an 8% tax on every bagel and cream cheese sold. So with Philly, through a partnership with the iconic chain H&H Bagels, we invented and debuted The Tax Free Bagel, a classic New York bagel, pre-stuffed with Philadelphia Cream Cheese, making it exempt from the unsavory bagel tax. We brought the bagel to the streets to get New Yorkers honest opinions on the tax, and our solution, and the resulting content was better than we ever expected.

We’re also incredibly proud of the work we got to do with Spanx and Ashley Graham where we got to see one of our first big ideas come to life and got to experience the uniquely powerful the energy of a predominately female-led project. For that campaign Spanx was launching their newest innovation, white pants that you can’t see through. They wanted to do something huge and attention grabbing.

We began with the all too familiar insight that wearing white pants leads to overthinking, thus leading us to land on the line we’re very proud of: “White Pants You Can Underthink.” As an ultimate product demo of the pants’ 100% opacity, we came up with the idea to put a nude of an influencer onto a billboard that is literally wrapped in the fabric from the Spanx pants. Proving once and for all that there’s finally a white pant out there that will hide the things you want to keep private. Our hopes and dreams were exceeded as we landed Ashley Graham for the campaign, and the rest was history.

We are passionate about anything funny, edgy, or possibly controversial (as long as we’re standing on the right side of history). We have been so lucky to be raised by the creatives that we look up to and they have really empowered us to be outspoken and courageous. We are always looking for ways to push beyond the ask and create work that is exciting for everyone, including ourselves! Some of our best ideas have yet to be made, so we’re looking forward to what’s to come.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

We are two Millennial women who grew up with the advertising of the 90’s and 2000’s which was arguably the source of the most chaotic content that lives eternally on the internet and in our memories. We were the targets of toy commercials that shaped our humor as well as fashion and diet ads that damaged us irrevocably. We still get excited when we remember one of our favorite ads from when we were kids. As creative people, we need to do something with that creativity and channeling it into making memorable content for brands we interact with on a daily basis is a both an honor and responsibility that we feel we have a keen understanding of. The desire to make work that we are proud to have in the world is what drives us and what we hope to be able to do at larger scales throughout our careers.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For us anxious girlies, we absolutely love being in control whenever we can be and when it comes to our creativity, that is in our control. We often joke that we are an endless pit of ideas, but it’s rooted in the fact that having good work is up to us. We trust ourselves, we trust our process and we trust in the work we present. Sure, we don’t have complete creative control of all the work we do, given clients, leadership, and other factors; but we have creative control over what we bring to the table, and that remains invariably rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Website: rarepaircreative.com

Image Credits
Photos on black background were taken by Rocky Ngyen All other photos were personal taken by family members or friends on our own cameras.