Work / 02
The Big Ass Calendar
I took a brand built for 40-somethings and carried it into Gen Z, and it crossed a million views.
Growth & marketing · Jan – May 2026
What it was
The Big Ass Calendar is Jesse Itzler’s company, a four-foot physical wall calendar you hang up to plan a whole year at a glance. It already worked with a 40 to 60 audience. My job was to prove a younger market existed and then go capture it.
- 1M+
- views, all earned
- 26
- finished creator videos
- $0
- campaign budget
Stills from the campaign videos.
The campaign
- Built and ran a 50-person college creator challenge from scratch.
- Recruited every creator myself and white-gloved roughly 70% of them all the way to a finished video.
- Made my own video alongside them.
- 26 finished videos drove 1M+ views on a $0 budget.
Bookstores
- Cold-called my way into the college-bookstore world.
- Learned the system through the Independent College Bookstore Association (ICBA), the trade group for self-operated college stores.
- Got the calendar onto the CU Boulder bookstore shelves, on order for the 2026 to 2027 school year.
- Wrote a playbook for the rest of the country, including what it takes to become an ICBA vendor partner.
What I walked away with
- Cold outreach at volume: reading a demographic I was not part of and walking straight into it.
- Recruiting and running 50 creators, and engineering content that traveled.
- Talking my way into a closed industry from the outside, all the way to a real shelf.