Create an effective, quick-turn, social-first holiday campaign that connects best of Etsy's marketplace to a household name influencer in our desired demographic.
Due to the limited capacity of most small-business creators, our goal was less about direct sales and more about reach and engagement and building an authentic connection between influential celebrity talent, their community, and our brand through the influencer’s channels, as well as Etsy's own.
When evaluating potential partners for this, knowing that we wanted to partner with someone who had an enthusiastic and loyal following, and also had an eye for both home and style.
Nicole Richie, with her highly engaged, demographically-aligned, 6.7M Instagram followers, and also has her own House Of Harlow brand, specializing in home jewelry and apparel collections, was a perfect fit. As a result, we decided to make this an Instagram-first execition, leaning into the various features and tools this platform has to offer, combining the reach of our channels.
The Approach:
Have Nicole leverage her leaned-in community to crowdsource ideas for an Etsy holiday gift collection, entirely curated by Nicole, use these suggestions to influence Nicole’s picks and finally, to share the results: Nicole Richie’s Holiday Collection. Essentially, leveraging the full force of Nicole’s Instagram to source, curate & share.
The Execution:
Source: Upon launch, Nicole used her Instagram in the form of reel as well as in stories with a question sticker, tapping into her community to crowdsource their favorite Etsy finds. Etsy amplified this call out on our own channel as well.
Curate: Once the suggestions were in, Nicole would go through them, choose her favorites, add some of her own choices and pull together her final holiday collection. Once that was completed, we used our time with Nicole to film her with the items to be featured in the collection, with something to say about each item, to be repackaged and used at launch.
Share: Upon launch of Nicole’s holiday collection, we wanted to not only lean into her audience, but to amplify via Etsy channels to fully leverage her influential star power. This would mean not only Etsy’s Instagram, but all of our available social and marketing channels, and (hopefully) earned media.
This collaboration far exceeded our expectations, leading not only to high reach and engagement, but also to earned media coverage and incremental merchandise sales.
We knew Nicole’s initial announcement and call to action would make some noise with her followers, but the results far exceeded expectations. Her request for Etsy favorites resulted in 4k+ submissions (and ~1M views), resulting in the most comments on one of her posts since 2019. We saw similar results on our own channel, with the launch reel being our most commented reel ever, resulting in another 3k submissions, totaling 7k in all.
Upon launch, our gift guide saw well-above influencer-benchmark for views (+156%) and engagements (+38%) on our Instagram, as well as collection page visits.
Earned media was not our goal, but our collaboration saw coverage in Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, Apartment Therapy, EOnline and others.
Not only that, we saw most items in the collection sell out, with the influx of Nicole’s fans generating above-expectations merchandise sales across the board.
