Project Eve is an premium retail brand in India unlike any other, present in 11 cities across 19 stores. Its unique concept ensured that independent, sophisticated women between 25 and 40 would be treated to a destination store built to provide everything a woman would need – from clothes, footwear, accessories, cosmetics, in-house salon, personal stylist – to look and feel fabulous.
While we didn't have the kind of ATL budgets our competitors were privy to, being primarily active on social media, we still had to:
> Find a way for our target audience to discover us.
> Drive offline store footfalls.
> Establish a strong relationships with our customers.
> End traditional lip service and create a real difference in the lives of Indian women.
> Be meaningful in the lives of our consumer.
> Ensure top-of-mind recall.
The only answer was to go beyond a good shopping experience and to give our audience an in-store experience like no other powered by our presence online.
Indian women are hands-on and hungry to learn. But they lacked easy access to platforms that could help them express their creativity, adopt new skills and engage with like minded women. To prove that Project Eve is by women and for women, we couldn't just be another fashion store. We needed to give the eves of India what they were searching for: a chance to break out of their shells and be part of something bigger.
Presenting, The She Sessions: a deeply curated, localised workshop platform for women, that no other brand has explored before. Held every weekend inside Project Eve stores, the workshops offer our audience real skills to empower, engage and enable themselves by covering topics ranging from rare art forms, health & wellness, career management, etc, all hosted by real women leaders.
The workshops gave 200+ artists a platform across 11 cities to conduct 200+ sessions that helped 3 lakh women gain social currency and added confidence to face the world at large. This helped create a differentiated experience that increased the likelihood of women walking into our stores and willingly connecting with the brand.
The offline She Sessions were brought to life with a unique use of our online presence.
Here's how we did it:
Step 1: We dug into Indian culture and discovered what women loved to learn and to create. We then hunted for relevant female talent to host every workshop.
Step 2: We used the power of Facebook to build She Sessions as a gateway to the brand by creating targeted communication focused on women who were interested in being part of the workshops.
Step 3: Once they paid us a visit, we conducted the most fun workshops as promised, where women had a chance to acquire new skills while getting to also experience our store.
Step 4: Online, women spread the word about the She Sessions and Project Eve, and as we expanded across India, we began gaining organic social traction.
Step 5: With the She Sessions workshops gaining popularity, Project Eve enjoyed mass awareness and better brand recall, for the store, the brand and all its offerings.
So what makes the She Sessions so unique?
> By designing our invite mechanism online we created a new and easy channel for our audience to engage with our store - something that didn't exist before.
> Women could not only take back their creations, they could also redeem a shopping voucher against fashion at Project Eve. This helped us convert footfalls into sales and encouraged the first of many purchases.
> Real women engaging with our brand in real time also served as free earned testimonials for Project Eve for women, both on our pages & community as well as their personal channels. And being a brand that is represented primarily on social media, this allowed us to generate real and relevant content every week to keep our online presence fresh and constantly updated.
> The She Sessions that started with targeted promotions became now sought after by our customers every week. As the popularity grew, we're almost always sold out within minutes of us creating an event without any promotions, due to the workshop's popularity and the power of social media.
With the Project Eve She Sessions, we managed to:
> Reach out to over 2 million women online and countless others through strong word of mouth.
> Get 300,000 of them to walk into our stores
> Achieve a 67% rise is store footfalls
> Increase our social media following by 67%
> Achieve a 6.9% engagement rate on social media, beating the 0.2% industry average.
In one year, here's how we performed:
> Total No. of sessions: 248
> Reach: Approx 2,16,784,512 across 19 stores in 11 cities.
> Registrations: Approx 1,098,360
> Attendees: Approx 3,36,268
> 45% rise in sales.
> Boosted online presence for the brand and contributed to the positive growth of the brand's e-commerce business.
In summary, we not only helped improve brand awareness and drove footfalls to our stores, we also got a chance to be a part of our customers lives and enrich their experience thus creating top of mind brand recall, all the while bringing a smile to their faces.
