For 21 years, the Easy Button has been doing the heavy lifting for Staples — a red disc that sold a million units, colonized office desks and turned “that was easy” into a phrase people say without thinking about who owns it. The problem with a symbol that good is that it only shows you the destination. It never shows you what you left behind.
So Staples built the thing you leave behind. The Hard Button is black, it’s the new counterpart to the red one, and it anchors “Hard vs. Easy” — a brand platform launched this week for the company’s 40th anniversary, developed with Bandits & Friends alongside Staples’ in-house team and Monks.
Two buttons, one choice
The construct is almost aggressively simple. Press Hard and you get the workday as most people have quietly agreed to accept it. Press Easy and you get Staples.
“Hard is what happens when unnecessary complexity becomes routine,” said Bob Sherwin, Chief Marketing Officer of Staples, Inc. “It is too many vendors, disconnected processes and workarounds people have simply learned to accept.”
That last clause is the strategic move. The campaign isn’t arguing that business is hard — everyone knows that. It’s arguing that a specific, fixable portion of hard has been misfiled as normal.
The comedy of small disasters
The work goes small on purpose. The B2B spot runs through empty coffee pots, snacks that don’t stack up and a rush reprint of signage, each from a different vendor — including a store sign that lands on “Golf Sharts” instead of “Shirts.”
The retail-facing spot handles confetti catastrophes and menu mishaps, then counters with balloons and same-day signs and banners ordered by noon.
Nobody is losing a quarter in these films. Somebody is losing an afternoon. That’s the more honest version of the pitch, and it’s the version a facilities lead or an office manager recognizes in about four seconds.
Why a 40-year-old brand needed a villain
Staples has a rare marketing problem: near-total awareness and a stubbornly narrow perception. People know the name and picture a wall of pens.
The actual business is janitorial and sanitation supplies, breakroom, furniture consultation and installation, custom print and marketing, with 75% of the Fortune 500 among its customers. Hard vs. Easy gives that range somewhere to live, because every unglamorous category Staples wants to talk about can be staged as a Hard moment first.
“For 40 years, Staples has upheld a simple promise: Make work Easy and help people and businesses succeed,” said Rachel Huckle, Chief Executive Officer of Staples, Inc. “The world of work has changed dramatically, but our promise has not.”
A platform, not a flight
Sherwin has been clear that this is built to run. The spots are live on YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, with cutdowns on LinkedIn and Meta, billboards in transit hubs, digital signage and elevator placements in office buildings, plus sales collateral built on the same Hard-and-Easy frame.
For Bandits & Friends — founded in 2023 by David Suarez, Danny Gonzalez and Courtney Berry, and now three years into a client list that includes Liberty Mutual and Care.com — it’s another turn at a job the shop keeps getting hired for: taking a brand with enormous recognition and finding the thing it hasn’t said yet.
The Easy Button never needed help being famous. It needed something to push against.
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