When I lived in London, Topshop was one of my guilty little pleasures. They had great cheap little clothes that were perfect for a backpacker - you could buy a little top or dress for £10 and not worry when they fell apart (usually after wearing them once).
I think I’m way too mutton to go shop there now (it would be like shopping at Dotti!) but I still love their brand, from releasing the Kate Moss collection to a new campaign on the Newton Machine.
They have recreated Helmut Newton’s “Newton Machine” by creating temporary photo studios in their busiest stores (and trust me, you needed to fight tooth and nail to get into their Oxford St store on a Saturday. Busy means seriously busy!).
Customers created their own self-styled self-taken photos in store, of which they were given a copy and was also loaded online.
The Machine’s original purpose was to capture the subject as they see themselves, which draws parallels to today’s obsession with engineering one’s self-image.
I think it’s a brilliant campaign and they really nailed their target market - the younger market that love having their photo taken, love dressing up and really love sharing the results.
The gallery is pretty hit and miss. The hits are hot but the misses are cringe-worthy. It makes me feel old to look at a photo and think “Your mother let you out of the house like that?”.
The hits are fun and powerful and are joyous in celebrating fashion and youth.
The misses (my opinion, not Topshop’s) have all taken posing lessons from Posh Spice or Britney… and who told those guys they should take off their shirts? The photos are skanky instead of stylish.
I love the campaign but there are a few things they could have done better. Their website for the campaign is clunky and has some awful Flash so you can’t use the back button, you need to navigate via their interaction design, which hasn’t been thought through. You can’t search or scroll through the images particularly well. The worst part is you can’t share any of the photos, or save them as they’ve been uploaded in Flash, so even if you find the picture of yourself there’s no way of forwarding it on. A terrible crime considering the target market and their propensity to Facebook/Bebo/Myspace everything.
And a final gripe has maybe been done deliberately but they haven’t linked anything back to the actual clothes. I’d love to be able to see what the Topshop models are wearing, and then click through to purchase the clothes. This would really complete the campaign for me.
This post is tagged under: Cool websites, Marketing
Ha, Top Shop was a guilty pleasure for me as well :)
Thanks for pointing this out - it is indeed an interesting and reasonably well executed project.
I beg to differ about the 2 skinny guys though: I think it’s kinda sweet/ironic.