There’s a version of this kind of campaign that gets made all the time. A few smiling photographs. A quote from a senior leader about the importance of inclusion. A LinkedIn post that disappears into the feed by lunchtime.

That’s not what Amazon asked us for. And it’s not what we made.

When Amazon came to Clearbox ahead of Supported Internships Day 2026 (27th March), the brief was straightforward: take the work the company has been proudly doing across its UK operations and tell it in a way that actually landed. Not a press release dressed up as a story. Something real.

First off – what’s the programme? 

Amazon launched its supported internship programme in 2021 to help more young people with SEND enter the workforce. It was expanded in 2023 through an ongoing partnership with national charity DFN Project Search. Since the launch of the programme, almost 300 young people have started a supported internship with Amazon, making the company the UK’s largest private sector provider of supported internships.

Supported internships at Amazon combine classroom education and practical work experience in a number of roles; all within an Amazon fulfilment centre, where items are stored, packed and shipped.

Amazon asked us to talk to supported interns to help tell their story to the world. 

Our job, as it usually is, started long before a camera was lifted or a word was written. 

Finding the right stories

The most important decisions in a project like this are made at the sourcing stage. 

We worked with Amazon’s Disability Inclusion team to identify the people whose experiences genuinely reflected the breadth of the programme. Different sites, different roles, different starting points. We weren’t looking for the tidiest narratives. We were looking for the truest ones.

We settled on six interns across three operations sites. The variety was deliberate. A campaign that features one type of person telling one type of story reads as curated. This needed to feel like a window, not a brochure.

Consent and comfort were built into the process from the start. For several of the interns, speaking publicly about their experience was something they’d never done before. We took the time to explain clearly how their stories would be used, gave everyone the option to review their case study before publication, and made sure support was available throughout. 

That groundwork made every subsequent conversation better.

The interviews

We do hundreds of interviews every year for programmes like this as part of our Amazon work, which you can read more about here. 

We don’t run standard Q&A sessions. 

Our approach is to listen until something genuinely interesting surfaces, then follow it. With the interns, that meant talking about the small things – the first-day nerves, the moment a task clicked, the colleague who made a difference. The details that don’t make it into an annual report but are the only things worth reading.

One Amazon lead told us afterwards that seeing their colleagues speak so openly had been “genuinely moving.” That’s the signal that the interviews worked.

Photography

We coordinated three full shoot days across Amazon fulfilment centres and delivery stations. Busy, live operational environments where our team needed to move quickly, build rapport fast, and find real moments within a tight window.

The brief to our photographer was simple: show people doing actual work. Not posed. Not staged. The images that came back reflected that – interns on the floor, engaged and capable, at ease in their environment. Every image was cleared for use across Amazon’s channels, with consent from all individuals featured handled as part of our scope.

The case studies

We turned the interview material into media and social media profiles, each structured to stand alone or sit within a series. Each one opens with the person, not the programme – who they are, what brought them there, what they were hoping for. The Amazon context earns its place from there.

The writing was calibrated to Amazon’s voice: direct, warm, grounded in specifics. No corporate boilerplate. No sentences that could have been written by anyone about anything.

What happened on the day

The content went live across Amazon LinkedIn and owned content channels on Supported Internships Day. While the content will go on to get thousands and thousands of views – the most important thing about the whole project goes beyond that. 

Giving these people the opportunity and platform to tell their stories, to help inspire others. That’s the measure that matters. Content that moves people to act, not just to scroll past.