“This piece was a Gold Lion for the jury because it marries together amazing storytelling and a brilliant piece of online retail. Making the clothes look super sexy and allowing the users to pause the video at any moment, navigating and sharing the clothing makes it a really beautiful piece of online content”.

Ian Tait President of the Cannes Lions Cyber Jury & ECD, Google

ONLY – THE LIBERATION

ONLY was established in 1995 and started out as a denim fashion brand. Initially it was a great success focusing exclusively on denim products, t-shirts, and tops. At the start of the global financial crises the brand started to feel additional pressure from competing brands while at the same time experiencing difficulties in getting consumers interested in their offerings.

From 2009 - 2010 the brand saw its first ever drop in total sales. This led to a less aggressive expansion strategy that was completely put on hold during the two following years. By 2011 both the brand values and the overall direction of the brand had become unclear. Sales were still declining and a decision to re-evaluate how the brand marketed its collections was made. Something had to be done otherwise the brand could have spiraled into terminal decline.

A new direction was established to move ONLY away from brands such as H&M & Gina Tricot and further towards the more lifestyle oriented Diesel and Levi’s brands. The creative solution was an online interactive film experi¬ence called ”The Liberation”. It’s a fashion catalogue, a movie, a game, a music video, and the worlds first, on demand, video retail environment.

As you watch the film you can start interacting with it. With a simple click at any time, the film freezes. Every item of clothing has been tracked and you can: browse, like, pin, tweet and buy. You are invited to interact with the film, moving the story forward. You can steal a pair of jeans, and if you’re lucky, the experience crosses over into reality and the jeans are sent to your home. Finally your personal experience is summed up in a bespoke catalogue, so you can revisit the clothes you looked at, buy the clothes, download the music, and share your experiences.

The project successfully managed to leverage digital, film, social media, and e-commerce to create a campaign that substantially lifted the products sold via ONLYs e-commerce platform (index 202 ). At the same time the brand experienced significant increase in sales across the physical retail outlets and an increase in basket size for the first time in seeral years.

Turning around a decline: ONLY Value Sales (Euros):

“The Liberation” created a global presence for a brand that have to work with very limited tradi¬tional media budgets and showed that globalization and digital media levels the playing field – if you play by the new rules.