River Island

In an increasingly challenging retail landscape, River Island, a long-established fashion retail brand was struggling to be heard and get noticed.

The brand had always inspired people to express themselves through Fashion. We now wanted River Island to inspire people to express themselves beyond fashion. We decided to help remove the barriers that were inhibiting self-expression by developing a strategy that focused on “banishing labels to clothes, not to the people who wear them”. This translated into our big idea LABELS ARE FOR CLOTHES, a focus on celebrating self-expression against a range of audiences who are unfairly labelled.

To ensure our campaign earned as much attention as possible we developed a cultural radar tool, RIDAR, that monitored conversations surrounding our creative themes, and signalled when best to activate our advertising, ensuring we communicated at the most provocative moments.

The campaign has been a resounding success, achieving +56 million earned impressions, increasing revenue and generating an ROI of 4:1. Most importantly, we got people taking about the importance in ditching the labels.