Case Study: Sephora Collection x Coach
Background:
Each year, Sephora Collection partners with an outside collaborator to drive buzz for Sephora Collection products and to drive new clients to Sephora stores. Past collaborations have included: Moschino, Museum of Ice Cream and Mario Brushes.
The Coach collaboration: two iconic brands, a leader in Fashion/Lifestyle and the number one beauty retailer in the world, come together to bring you a unique collaboration. The collection combines Sephora Collection’s expertise in product development with a modern, youthful interpretation to Coach’s iconic brand codes, Tea Rose, Rexy and Sharky, and brings to life a playful sprit & inherent charm reflective of Coach’s core brand values: Optimism, Authenticity and Inclusivity.
This is the FIRST EVER, SIMULTANEOUS global launch for Sephora Collection across US, Canada, Asia and Europe both on dotcom and in stores. We are targeting Sephora clients that are interested in new, trendy, limit edition products. We are using Coach’s signature design rooted in a playful approach to heritage with a pop culture twist. Each of these beauty essentials feature exclusive design codes inspired by the legacy & mood of Coach.
Concepting:
My role always starts with the concept phase. We work as a team to look up swipe, put together a moodboard and work with our company partners to find the right vibe for our campaigns that relate back to the brief. We then have to set up the products for test shoots and sketch out the MANY places where they will live.
For this campaign, We wanted to capture these products in a manner that matched the playfulness of the packaging. Because of COVID19, I had to set up and test shoot the products from home, using my environment and found objects. This allowed me to work with my design counterpart remotely so we had accurate sizing of the products to create our photography sketches. Also, since I was home alone during covid, I had the ~brilliant~ idea to take Rexie (the dinosaur eye palette) on a tour around my apartment and snapped a few photos to make my coworker laugh. From this, I was able to capture the reflective qualities of the metallic product packaging from this beautiful collection. This photo was brought to our VP and inspired the rest of the photo direction of the campaign! (see below)
Capturing the reflective qualities and expressive shadows in my room.
Setting up our hero shot using my bed as a backdrop and found prop items to hold things up.
Photoshoot
Using our concept board, we worked with a photo team to prop, style, shoot and retouch our campaign photos. This process starts with us designers, using the images taken above, to create sketches for each product grouping that will be able to be used in multiple instances (in-store, web, social, digital ads, digital marketing etc). We painstakingly put together a shoot brief with all necessary notes and details the external team will need to execute these shots. During the photoshoot, we came together on zoom to help direct and collaborate on this shoot. Below are some behind-the-scene photos of how our brilliant prop stylist was able to use shadow vectors I provided to bring our hero shadows to life along with interesting ways to add reflections, like a CD!
Behind the scenes photos so you can see how we brought the shadows and reflections to life using glass reflections, plants, cds and everything else we could think of!
Content creation
While our photos are going through the retouching phase after capture, we use scratch photos to start mocking up all of the assets for the campaign. As a 360 team, we create assets for every placement at Sephora including digital (email, site, ads), social, and in-store. We work together with our marketing and product managers to come up with campaign asset lists, group them into bundles, work with our PMs to create timelines and directly partner with copy while creating content. We also work with derivative bundles and guide production or external agencies on which assets they are creating for our campaigns. At Sephora, we have a style guide and templates to follow for brand continuity but we also find ways to flex and allow our campaigns to shine.
Digital: An example of the site assets we create for Sephora Campaigns. The above is our homepage hero slide for site and the right is a dedicated hero email.
Social: Instagram carousel to tease out the collection before launch. Wondering how these photos were captured? I created these vector shapes in illustrator and sent them over to our photo team. They laser cut them and captured white on white images of the cut out shadows and then the smears full bleed. We had retouching make the cutouts transparent, so I was able to place the shadow image over the full-bleed smears to create this fun teaser effect.
Social: An accompanying instagram story that was posted with the teaser carousel. I concepted this story idea directly with my amazingly talented copy partner to make sure it was fun and flowed. My creation processes was as follows: 1) type the text in instagram for a native effect (not having native type makes these REALLY feel like an ad) 2) drop the type images into photoshop and add all of the illustrative elements 3) import the layered PSD into After Effects and add animations 4) communicate back and forth with our partners to find the right copy, composition, messaging, etc 5) complete! :)
Social: Launch Day video! This asset was not marked as an animation asset, but I wanted to use my animation skills to bring more life and playfulness to this image for social. I achieved this effect by bringing the 2d butterfly shadows into after effects and transforming them to 3d objects. I also added to ambient rainbow using an animated mask. This post blew up on our socials and performed better than 70% of our other posts!
Social: Launch Day Instagram story! This also posted in tangent with the launch day post and was not marked as a necessary video asset. However, I had extra time and was inspired to bring animation to these assets as well to add life and play.
Teaching: I wanted to share my animation process with the Sephora team. I put together a company wide Lunch & Learn, sponsored by our VP, to teach how to use After Effects and animate 2D objects to boost our design skills and assets.
Front of Store Fixture: The left is the render and the right is the final product. Because this was created during the SF covid lockdown, we are unable to print out and mock-up these fixtures in the office. To solve for this, I worked with our visual merchandising team and the products I had at home to create to create to-scale renders of the fixtures for presentations. This process has now been implemented throughout all teams. Also, the “COACH x Sephora Collection” topper is not a normal asset created for front of store. The brief for this project stated that they wanted as much brand recognition for Coach as possible. I worked with our team to see if we had the budget to make an attention-grabbing topper using full color and print foils to make an impact. As you can see, we were able to bring this to life and our merchandising partners were over the moon! We were also 110% above sales with this fixture and had amazing feedback with this successful campaign.