
Fashion Award
Issue 18 | March 2011
Agency
Forsman & Bodenfors
Creative Team
Art Director: Janna Norberg; Copywriter: Ida Backman, Filip Nilsson; Designer: Anton Robsarve; Web Producer: Eva Raberg, Stefan Thomson; Account Director: Susanna Fagring; Account Manager: Katarina Klofsen
Production Team
Digital Production Company: Thomson Interactive; Media/Event: MEC; PR: Ibeyo
Other Credits
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Christine Eliasson
Date
October 2010
Background
Every year in October IKEA launches a campaign in Sweden to promote their wardrobes and storage. This year they asked the agency to think twice about the campaign structure. Could they give a vitamin injection to the one of the least sexy categories in home furnishing?
Idea
Storage is dull. Wardrobes, shelves and wire baskets live in a remote corner of people's hearts. But the stuff they put inside wardrobes, like their clothes, shoes, hats, jewellery, now that is all highly emotional. But IKEA is not really a fashion brand, is it?
Well, why not?
An email was sent out to Sweden’s most exciting young fashion designers offering them a unique opportunity to open up a shop.
A very small but functional shop – inside an IKEA wardrobe.
A jury was assembled by A jury was assembled by Margareta van den Bosch, executive creative advisor at H&M, to decide which ideas should be approved and
an empty store was rented in the Biblioteksgarten, the smartest street in Stockholm, where the selected wardrobe-stores could show their wares.
Within three weeks, 369 designers had submitted their collections to the website. Now they had to get people to visit the site and ‘like’ their work. The more ‘likings’ they got, the more website space they got.
Many of those young creatives turned out to be true marketing experts, getting thousands upon thousands of people to help promote them on their Facebook walls and blogs.
Finally the jury made its choice and 25 happy finalists built their own wardrobe shops overnight. The world's smallest and most interesting fashion arcade opened with a party and an overall winner was chosen.
Results
After 10 days 140,000 people had visited the award website www.ikeagarderob.se (still counting). 62 journalists attended the press conference at the store opening and 10,500 people visited the store(s) in four days.
Our Thoughts
In Sweden recently I met up with Jonas Lembke, a creative luminary who has had stints in New York, London and Australia before heading home. He thinks the reason Forsman & Bodenfors are doing such great work is that they never went ‘digital’. No fanfare of trumpets. They just want to reach people in the most expedient way and sometimes that is through digital media. Sometimes it’s with a book. See page xx.
“We punch above our weight creatively, partly because we’re Anglicised so our humour, even our ideas, are easily grasped in the USA and the UK where the big awards shows happen. But partly because we have this sense that no-one’s watching what we do, tucked away from the rest of the world. So without pressure, we can try doing things differently.”
Like selling wardrobes through how you can fill them.