How to bring technology geeks and a major fashion retailer together?
House of Fraser is a well known brand on the high street however as most major companies have recently discovered, you don’t stay that way for long unless you are using cutting edge technologies.
HoF already had a fairly large technology department however to grow and continue to be market leaders they had to expand it and that required for more people to be aware of the fantastic opportunities for a career in technology and design at House of Fraser.
We (the team at SMRS) offered them to create the House of Digital. Most technologically minded people already frequent many technology and design sites and messaging boards like Stack Overflow, Smashing Magazine etc. However there aren’t many sites that are dedicated to the retail side of technology not to mention fashion retail. House of Digital would be the place where both people working at HoF and guest writers would share the latest industry news and case studies as well as engage the readers in conversation. This would raise House of Fraser’s profile in a genuine way rather than just using plain advertising.
House of Digital wouldn’t be overly House of Fraser branded as not to dilute from the informative and collaborative nature of the website, however it would also contain a careers section where people would be able to learn more about and apply for any tech career opportunities at House of Fraser.
To engage the audience in a more direct way we proposed to launch a series of hackatons under the name ‘Make Them Talk’. The internet of things has gone from a fancy futuristic vision to the reality of tomorrow and it is especially important to keep customers engaged in retail environments. So the hackatons would be themed around making things that usually don’t interact to talk to each other. It might be a phone keeping track of what’s in the shopping basket or tablet suggesting what might go well together with that scarf. This would be visualised through anthropomorphic objects interacting (or not) with each other.
We also developed a storyboard for a promotional video. Click the thumbnail below to see it'.
We also suggested an Employee Referral Program that would be a cheeky take on the phrase “There’s an app for that!” There’s a Friend for That would be a website that would look a lot like the screen of an iPad, but instead of apps each square would represent a role that needs to be filled. By clicking on it you could see the description of the role and forward the details to your friends who would be a good fit for it. When the role would be filled the blank profile would be replaced by a short bio of the hired person.
