The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2017
Fotile turns range-hood grease into ink for a love-letter book — 1.2M send in their oil
At an expo where rivals warned about fumes, Fotile had users' range-hood oil made into ink and printed a 209-page book of love letters.
Fotile (方太) · S.G. Advertising (胜加)
What it had to solve
Fotile's appliance market was saturated and sales growth was slowing, so product features alone could not move the brand. At the 2017 China International Kitchen Appliance Expo every rival talked about the harm of cooking fumes; Fotile and its agency of 15 years, SG, chose to reframe the brand instead.
How it works
In October 2017, at the China International Kitchen Appliance Expo where nearly every hood maker warned about the dangers of cooking fumes, Fotile did the opposite: it collected the grease that accumulates inside its range-hood oil cups, had it converted into ink by a research lab, and printed a real book of love letters called 油烟情书 (Kitchen Love Letter).
The film behind the book was adapted from a true story: a couple who exchanged more than 1,800 letters over 50 years. Their letters became the stage on which the campaign played out, with the kitchen itself — smoke, steam, meals — as the scenery. Users were invited to mail in oil from their own hoods to receive a copy, and the campaign turned the expo booth and 1,597 retail stores into bookshops.
Fotile framed the idea as a shift in perception: oil fumes are not a hazard to escape but evidence that someone is cooking for the people they love. The brand's job was to remove the harm and leave the love. SG, which had worked with Fotile for 15 years, called the project an experiment in 'making the creative physical'.
Why it lands
- It reversed the category's core negative — cooking fumes — into proof that someone cooks for you out of love.
- The physical book made the abstract idea tangible: each reader's own kitchen oil literally became the ink of the message.
- The film anchored the stunt in a real couple's 1,800 letters over 50 years, turning a gimmick into a story.
- By staging the expo booth and 1,597 stores as bookshops, it converted retail space and a trade show into content distribution.
What it did
1.2 million people donated oil and received the book; 14 bookstores held exhibitions; four celebrities read their own oil-printed letters on TV shows watched by 64 million; the campaign logged 149.3 million media impressions, 4,023 press mentions and 4.7 million comments about cooking and love. It won the 2018 Jin Tong (LongXi) gold for creative film, and rivals like ofo, Ctrip and 百雀羚 soon copied the 'love letter' format.
What you can take
When a category sells fear of a by-product, the braver move is to re-own that by-product as proof of love — and make the audience's own contribution the material of the message.
Since then
The campaign won the 2018 Jin Tong (LongXi) gold award for creative film, and the phrase 'love letter' was widely copied by other Chinese brands within weeks. Fotile went on to reuse the same 'branded object born from a negative' approach in later work such as 地球情书 (Earth Love Letter).
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