In 2020, fashion industry profits plunged by 93% and Benetton was on the brink of collapse. Its 5000 stores were closed. Its dotcom was outdated. Gen Z were abandoning the brand. Benetton needed a purpose-led, digital-first and ultra-personalized transformation.

Benetton partnered with one agency to drive the company’s transformation via a 360 rehaul of its global ecommerce experience. Applying the brand’s signature philosophy online and giving it a clear and distinctive role in contemporary culture was the key aspect of the brief.

The brief had an aggressive 18-week timeframe and an extensive set of strategic and executional tasks:

How to engage Gen Z without alienating existing customers

How to convert existing customers to omni-channel customers

How to grow digitally-influenced sales and minimise cross-channel barriers

How to upend competition with cutting edge user experience and editorial content

How to better communicate the premium quality and positive environmental impact of Benetton’s products

To create new relationships with Gen Z, Benetton needed a purpose-led, digital-first and ultra-personalised experience.

Having had purpose long before ‘brand purpose’ was a thing, they famously advocated for diversity through the lens of color. But the very thing that inspired previous generations had been left behind.

To reinstate purpose, we’ve designed everything around two words: Blend Different. In doing so we merged the brand’s history of creating thought-provoking ideas with an experience that put purpose at the core.

Blending was built into every moment. We blended color and looks to drive product exploration & discovery. We blended gender with unisex product search, browsing & inspiration. We blended content and commerce with editorial features that celebrated diversity, inclusion & environmental impact.

To bring it all together, we created a modular design system blending highly personalised & unexpected combinations of products, stories & culture to ignite new relationships with our audience.

Our audience saw the brand playing a role in culture, not just fashion, and having active positioning on topics like sustainability, diversity and inclusion. We embraced attitudes and behaviour of “independent optimists” (a psychographic rather than demographic audience target) and focused on deepening self-expression through experimentation with colours, materials and garments across age and gender gamuts.

The ambition behind “blend different” was to empower Benetton customers through unexpected yet highly relevant combinations of products, stories and cultural moments.

This vision was mapped against three experience stages - Help Me Dream, Help Me Shop, Help Me Blend - covering an end-to-end customer journey across Benetton’s ecosystem.

With key KPIs being Engagement, Conversion and Brand Reputation, we brought the experience to life as a series of signature brand moments through the lens of “color as interface,” allowing us to create actionable moments of wonder taking users deeper into the world of Benetton.

Implemented using the Salesforce platform, the experience was brought to life using:

Modern design system. We created a modular, dynamically adaptable architecture that could easily scale and flex for all user contexts, business requirements and market specifics. Irrespective of device and browsing setup, its design delivered a cohesive, stand-out experience for all Benetton customers globally.

Contextual storytelling brought editorial content and commerce together to inspire and engage Benetton’s wide ranging audiences. Envisaged with cross-over appeal and highly personalised, it covered a range of themes from style to craft, societal and environmental impact, and culture as well as played the role of a conceptual core of the experience.

Signature brand experiences were brought to life through the lens of colour as interface. This foundational concept was applied to product discovery & exploration and allowed us to create actionable moments of wonder that took users deeper into the world of Benetton.

Covering 4455 SKUs and extending to 1110 pages, the experience was concepted, designed and delivered in groundbreaking 18 weeks (all while working completely remotely) and went live right before Christmas 2020 in 8 markets (UK, ITALY, GERMANY, GREECE, SPAIN, JAPAN, PORTUGAL, USA).

The new experience had an immediate and staggering business impact.

In the first two months since launch (January, February 2021), Benetton registered:

53% increase in revenue (from digital)

59% increase in page views

14% increase in average dwell time

8% increase in conversion