In early 2020, Covid lockdowns took away most occasions to style ourselves: no parties, no dates, no office. Every day became Casual Friday.

Zalando wanted to inspire people to continue living out their joy of styling at home. The brief: Creating a social first content format to provide joy in an unsure and unprecented time without ignoring it.

We turned Casual Friday into #StyledayFriday – a weekly UGC social format that offered a new opportunity to try out new styles together and share them with the community every Friday. One of the most important aspects of the idea was not only putting out content, but creating said community made of global and local influencers, Zalando employees turned influencers and social users themselves. With weekly topics and challenges, we wanted to not only provide inspiration, but showcase and celebrate the fashionable creativity of the social community above all else.

The target audience for #StyledayFriday were women and men between the ages of 16 and 44 years in all 17 Zalando markets with a high social media affinity This extended to Zalando followers as well as non-followers. By providing new styling challenges and inspirational content weekly, we laid the foundation for users to create their own interpretation of that week's #StyledayFriday topic. The best looks were shared on the Zalando channels and rewarded with Zalando vouchers, adding a further incentive to create UGC through this user celebration. This was especially highlighted by making 5 of the most active users part of the "Zquad", an integral part of the activation's content creation for the Zalando channels. This gave users the spotlight in the activation in a credible way, making it not only a hub of UGC and inspirational brand content, but actually focusing on the fashion inspiration the community could provide.

To inspire users to live out their joy of styling at home, we provided weekly style content, topics and challenges. #StyledayFriday started in peak lockdown in April of 2020 and ran until October 2020, being adapted to fit the changing cultural events while still offering fashion inspiration and user celebration.

It took place on Zalando’s global and local social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook and TikTok), its website and newsletters and the accounts of international and local influencers.

By working with these different kinds of influencers and turning Zalando employees and #StyledayFriday power users into influencers, we created a community for fashion inspiration during lockdown across all Zalando markets and reached a new audience.

As a result, #StyledayFriday became the fastest-trending lockdown hashtag in the fashion industry. Social engagement doubled and weekly content reached more than 182 million users. The follower growth quadrupled, making #StyledayFriday one of the reasons for reaching more than 1 million followers on Zalando’s Instagram.