We didn’t want to make a campaign about a product. We wanted to make a campaign about a feeling. The freedom to play. The color of summer. The pretend. We needed someone who could see what we were seeing. Someone who could paint not just what was there—but what wasn’t.

That’s when Kamryn had an idea. “Let’s go back to my school.”

Kamryn has studied at MCAD—the Minneapolis College of Art and Design — and they were holding their annual art sale. We figured maybe, just maybe, we’d find someone there who saw the world like my kids did. Hundreds of paintings lined the walls. Every style. Every medium. We wandered.

And then, without saying anything, Kamryn and I both pointed to the same painting. “That’s the feeling.”

It was the color. The detail. The little hidden things inside the painting that you almost missed unless you really looked. We kept wandering the gallery, surrounded by work from scores of artists. But whenever a piece stopped us—whenever we felt that spark—we’d crouch down to read the name. It was always the same: Mat Ollig.

We left that afternoon saying the same thing: “We have to find this guy.”

Fast-forward a few months. We’re standing outside a studio door on the north side of Minneapolis, about to see the progress for the first time. He opens the door, and immediately, we’re in his world. Canvases leaned on every wall. Brushes and oil-stained rags. Stacks of old phone books he uses to dry paint brushes. A giant monitor showing a digital rendering—his reference as he transfers his work square-by-square onto canvas.

This wasn’t a painter trying to keep up with trends. This was someone living inside the lineage of his craft. “It’s basically LARPing oil painting,” he said, smiling. And he wasn’t wrong. He built his own frames and remade his tools to match a time long gone. Even his paints looked unearthed rather than bought—bottles and labels recreated to feel like they’d survived centuries. His palette, his brushes, the very chemistry of his work—it all belonged to another era. And he was right at home in it.

That’s the level he works at.

His paintings are like dream sequences grounded in realism. Vivid portraits with layers that pull you in—reflections that tell other stories, color that carries emotional weight. He handed us these special glasses he made, and we put them on while staring at the piece. Suddenly, colors started to separate, to float off the canvas, like 3D without the gimmick. “Color theory,” he said. “But mine.”

What we saw that day was everything we had imagined—and somehow, more. Mermaid tails. Sunken treasure. Ships and fish. And faces so full of expression it stopped me—because beneath all the color, I saw more than my own children. Wonder. Joy. A moment of play, frozen in paint, but alive in every way that mattered.

Today, two 4’ x 4’ paintings by Mat Ollig hang in the main conference room at our headquarters in Eden Prairie. When people walk into that room, they stop. The colors grab you. The detail keeps you. The feeling stays.

We didn’t just start a campaign. We captured something we never want to lose: the world of pretend. The ability to play within your own mind. To dream up something that real.

And it took an artist to bring it back to life.