From an April Fools' rumour to a Gold Lion: how T-Rex Leather roared at Cannes 2026

Some ideas are so bold they sound made up. When we first heard about a plan to create leather from reconstructed T-Rex collagen, we knew two things straight away: that some people would assume it was an elaborate joke, and that it had the makings of one of the most extraordinary stories we'd ever get to tell.
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Eighteen months later, that story has earned a Gold and a Silver Cannes Lions in the PR category, and been named the single best Gold Lion-winning campaign of the festival by one of the industry's most respected voices.
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The story we set out to tell
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We began working on the T-Rex Leather project with VML in early 2025. The brief was unlike anything else on our desks: help tell the story of a world first,leather made using reconstructed T-Rex collagen, developed by Lab-Grown Leather alongside The Organoid Company. Over the following eighteen months we that story for a global audience, working towards the launch of the finished product, a luxury handbag, unveiled in Amsterdam earlier this year.
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Leading the international PR campaign meant navigating plenty of twists and turns. Plenty of people initially thought the whole thing was an April Fools' joke. Our job was to turn that scepticism into genuine fascination, and to help a wonderfully bonkers scientific idea become a story that captured imaginations around the world.
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Recognised on the world stage
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This year at Cannes Lions, the campaign won both a Gold and a Silver in the PR category. The T-Rex Leather campaign also picked up two Bronze Lions overall, one in CreativeB2B (Market Disruption) and one in Innovation (Environmental), with Propeller credited as the PR agency on both.
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For an independent agency, seeing our work recognised alongside campaigns from the world's largest agency networks is a lovely reminder that compelling ideas and expert execution can compete on any stage. In the PRWeek Cannes rankings, the work helped Propeller finish 30th overall with four awards in total.
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Named the number one Gold Lion of Cannes 2026
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n his  annual review of the Gold Lion winners, PRovoke Media founder Paul Holmes ranked T-Rex Leather at number one out of the six Gold-winning campaigns.
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What stood out to him was that, beneath the spectacle, the campaign solved a real business problem in a way only PR could achieve. The lab-grown leather category had been dismissed by the fashion industry, on the logic that any material replicable at scale could not be a true luxury product. By framing T-Rex Leather as a scientific artifact, building it out with a documentary and press materials, and auctioning it with an opening bid of $600,000, the campaign reframed the entire narrative around value and desirability.
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The results speak for themselves: 4.63 billion media impressions, a tenfold increase in interest from luxury brands and designers, and a 279% rise in the company's share price. As Holmes put it, this was brilliant branding, disruptive marketing and game-changing PR all at once.
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Why this one matters to us
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Even though we're in the business of PR, this campaign reminded us that the best communications aren't just about landing headlines. They're about helping a bold and brilliant idea resonate globally, and working with brilliant partners to make it land.
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A huge thank you to VML, Lab-Grown Leather, The Organoid Company, Art Zoo Museum, For The Right Reasons, and everyone who let us run wild with such an ambitious brief.

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