The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2025–2026
Loctite opens a Museum of Second Chances for broken things — Webby-winning repair
A TikTok-first campaign turns repaired objects into museum exhibits, then opens a one-night Museum of Second Chances in Melbourne — winning a 2026 Webby.
Loctite (Henkel)
What it had to solve
Loctite is an adhesive brand whose real enemy is a culture that throws things away instead of fixing them. With a young, social-first agency (Kill Boring Dead), the brand wanted to stand for the art of repair — not with a corporate message, but with a world young audiences would want to join.
How it works
Loctite makes glue, but its marketing target was a behaviour: most people throw broken things away rather than repair them. Working with Australian social-first agency Kill Boring Dead, the Henkel brand built a campaign around a simple reframe — what if something broken and repaired was treated not as a sad compromise but as art?
The idea lived first on TikTok under #museumofsecondchances, where audiences were invited to reimagine broken or discarded items and share them as 'second chance creations'. On October 16, 2025 the hashtag became a real place for one night: the Museum of Second Chances at Melbourne's @14 Gallery, where repaired objects and DIY creations were exhibited like fine art, alongside a Loctite Glue Station styled as an analogue photo lab, a mosaic built live with Loctite glue, and a curated display of viral craft work by creator Candy Brat.
The one-night museum capped a national TikTok competition: influencers Martina Calvi and Candy Brat drove entries, and the winner was flown to Melbourne to see the exhibition, receiving a $1,500 prize pack of flights, accommodation and a creative starter kit. Loctite brand manager Anemicke Du Plessis called it a campaign that 'connects digital storytelling with physical brand experience in a way that is authentic to our product and our audience'.
The creative judgement — making a museum for broken things — proved strong enough to travel: the campaign won the 2026 Webby Award in Social & Games – Weird and was also shortlisted in Arts, Culture & Lifestyle, competing against Wicked, Taylor Swift and The Beatles, a striking result for a social-first campaign from an independent Australian agency.
Why it lands
- It flips a stigma (a broken thing is a failure) into a status (a repaired thing is a story worth exhibiting).
- The museum metaphor gives the product a cultural role — glue becomes the force that lets memory survive.
- UGC competition mechanics let the audience supply the content, so the campaign scales without a media budget.
- The one-night gallery created scarcity and a shareable event moment for creators and press alike.
- Gloriously specific and 'weird' work stands out in a category where glue ads usually just show things sticking.
What it did
The Webby Awards named the Museum of Second Chances the 2026 winner in Social & Games – Weird and shortlisted it for Arts, Culture & Lifestyle against Wicked, Taylor Swift and The Beatles. For Loctite it reframed a glue brand as the patron of repair culture — a 'love letter to craft, memory and repair' that put mending on the same emotional footing as making.
What you can take
To make a mundane product stand for a movement, give the audience a place in the story: a 'museum' let customers submit their own repairs, so the audience built the campaign.
Since then
The Museum of Second Chances completed its one-night run in October 2025, and in April 2026 the Webby Awards gave the campaign its win in Social & Games – Weird plus a shortlist in Arts, Culture & Lifestyle, where it competed against Wicked, Taylor Swift and The Beatles. For Loctite, the campaign positioned the brand at the centre of a repair-culture conversation it had begun as an ongoing TikTok platform — a limited-time stunt whose concept outlived the event itself.
Sources
- Loctite champions the art of repair with Museum of Second Chances launch via Kill Boring Dead
- Loctite opens the Museum of Second Chances to restore repair to our throwaway culture
- The Loctite Museum of Second Chances (press release)
- Kill Boring Dead scores Webby win for Loctite's Museum of Second Chances
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