Holt Renfrew

Few Canadian brands define luxury like Holt Renfrew. While Canadians who love fashion agree that Holts is without peer, that doesn’t always mean they think to visit the retailer. Zig’s challenge: how to deliver hard-working, traffic-driving retail advertising to the luxury store.

The solution lay in the insight that the fashion-savvy, who live for the new collections, are driven less by loyalty and consistency and more by surprise. The agency decided to replicate this experience in the advertising by building campaigns using newspaper, direct mail and guerrilla efforts around three specific events:

• To celebrate Burberry’s 150th birthday, they created a newspaper campaign that recalled the heady days of the British invasion.

• To make Holts the destination for designer shoes, they created a campaign of six full-page newspaper ads rooted in the relationship the fashion-savvy have with their shoes.

• And finally, to support the opening of a new store in Vancouver, they created a newspaper campaign using the look of architectural blueprints that featured drawings of models wearing designer clothing and accessories.

Holts is a private company and doesn’t release results, but all events exceeded objectives for traffic and sales. Burberry is bigger than ever, the shoe boutique is setting sales records and the Vancouver store launch wasvery successful. The “Chase” campaign, featuring crazed fashionistas, also picked up ADCC Gold, Silver and Merit awards.