creative direction & design | OU Holiday 2019
Holidays are traditionally a difficult time for secondhand retail, but reports from news outlets in 2019 began to show a rise in public acceptance of secondhand retailers as a source for getting great gifts for the holidays. Since launching their shipping feature in 2018, OfferUp has been poised to enter the Holiday retail space as a premier destination for shopping deals on gifts.
For the 2019 Holiday season, I planned and designed a comprehensive creative campaign spanning all of our marketing channels to market OfferUp as the best place to find all of the gifts on your list, for less than retail prices. For the first time ever in the history of OfferUp’s visual design, my team planned, shot and edited all-original photography, and created all of our content in-house instead of supplementing user content or stock photos.
The result was massively successful – we increased send volume by nearly 400%, driving up to 3.72% CTR on our marketing emails and pushing out marketing content nearly every day after Thanksgiving. Our campaigns drove a year-over-year lift in shipping revenue for our business, and increased our overall user engagement.
VISUAL DESIGN PROCESS
First, my team and I examined best-in-class Holiday campaigns from other retailers. Key themes we wanted to include were cleanliness, bright photography, eclectic style, and elegant product styling. A few brands emerged as our inspiration, namely: Anthropologie, ModCloth, Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom, Madewell and Target.
We then started explorations with colors, type and illustrations that fit within our brand guidelines, but played well as a unique campaign art direction, distinguished from the original OfferUp brand.
visual design explorations
Early email concept sketches
FINALIZED DESIGN DIRECTION
Photoshoot planning & art direction
Once we had stakeholder approval on our creative direction, my team set out to create a full creative calendar of design deliverables, spanning all of our marketing channels and covering 6 weeks of content. I also wrote a shotlist consisting of 35 unique “scenes” with product we knew would perform well based on previous campaign data. My team sourced items from around our offices to save money on buying items.
The photoshoot took two days and resulted in about ~1100 raw photos.
CONTENT PHOTOSHOOT PROCESS AND DOCUMENTATION
Whiteboard calendar with featured product checklist
SELECT FINAL (EDITED) PHOTOS
FINAL RESULT
My team planned, built, scheduled and sent a total of 16 email campaigns, 27 in-feed IG/FB posts, and 24 Instagram Stories graphic sets, plus created new social media banners to match our art direction and updated our shipping website landing page.
EMAIL EXAMPLES
SOCIAL POST EXAMPLES
(Click to expand proof into lightbox)
