Case study: Habitat collaborates with House of Holland

Contemporary homewares company, Habitat, has hit the news with its collaboration with London designer Henry Holland. The vibrant collection and the campaign behind it, has brought the 50-year old Habitat brand to a wider fashion-savvy audience. In this candid interview, Habitat’s Digital Marketing Manager, Natalie Crane, and PR Manager, Adam Crudgington, uncover the thinking behind the creative collaboration and reveal the workings of the PR, SEO and social project which launched the collection.

Habitat presented their case study at our London event in May alongside UNILAD entitled, ‘Reinvention: British brands Habitat and UNILAD’. If you missed the event, or if you want a reminder of the key points from Habitat, this interview provides some snappy insights.

Over the last decade Habitat has had its struggles, what’s the situation now?

“We’ve rebuilt the brand completely in the last five years after it went into very high profile administration. This has involved creatively reinvigorating our product, re-looking at our pricing structure, developing a store strategy and developing a strong visual identity for what the Habitat brand stands for today. It’s been a long journey but we feel that the brand is now back on form and a lot of people are loving what they are seeing.”

Tell us more about Habitat’s story

“For over 50 years Habitat has been imagining life as it should be. Since our revolutionary beginnings in 1964, Habitat has challenged conventions and shaped the way people live. Making outstanding design accessible to all has been a tenet of the brand from founder Sir Terence Conran onwards. Habitat has been under the leadership of Managing Director, Clare Askem, since 2011 and the brand’s in-house London design studio has been led by Creative Director, Polly Dickens, since 2012. Habitat has three London flagship stores, a new standalone store in Leeds, Mini Habitat stores opening across the UK (7 already opened with a further 10 scheduled for 2017) within Sainsbury’s as well as our online home at www.habitat.co.uk. Habitat has been owned by J Sainsbury plc since September 2016.”

Why did Habitat choose to collaborate with House of Holland?

“We wanted to collaborate with a relevant designer that shared our creative outlook in terms of colour and pattern. Working with House of Holland also helped us to engage with a new fashion-focused audience and HOH’s strong social and online presence was very important for Habitat’s digital focus. We first collaborated with Henry in 2016 and received great feedback from customers and industry press which led to this second collection in 2017.”

How does the marketing campaign support this collaboration?

“We heavily focused on digital marketing for this project owing to House of Holland’s and Henry Holland’s substantial online following. It was an opportunity for Habitat to develop its own digital strategy and incorporate new technology that hadn’t been used in the interiors industry before. In 2016, we were the first to use Facebook Live to broadcast an exclusive interview with Henry Holland from the launch party to all Habitat fans. In 2017, we evolved this to incorporate Snapchat, Instagram Stories and, working with The Hoxton, Holborn in which House of Holland x Habitat had a room takeover – we created an interactive 360 ThingLink to engage with new online audiences. We also supported this through an email programme and paid social media to amplify the whole campaign.”

What matters most, in terms of PR?

“For us it was about reaching new audiences by placing large scale features within fashion titles that we did not have access to before. Introducing Henry – a hugely well-known personality – opened a lot of doors for Habitat as a brand with the fashion press which has since led to further PR opportunities and led to us having much wider consideration amongst press.”

How does SEO work for the new collection?

“Hosting a large-scale VIP launch event and hotel room take over allowed us to engage with high profile bloggers and influencers with high domain authority (DA). This activity meant bloggers could write about their experience and link back to the Habitat site, boosting ranking positions for key words. Producing high quality, fashion-focused digital content (photography/movie footage) meant that bloggers naturally want to feature the collection and link back to us. We also supported the campaign through paid search to ensure we had more real estate on the search engine results pages (SERPS).”

How did you develop the social project?

“We worked with Punch Communications on developing a content strategy and timeline. This involved key interactive elements such as high level competitions, shareable GIFs and video. The campaign was mainly focused on Facebook, with behind-the-scenes content used across Instagram and Snapchat.”

So, has the campaign worked?

“Yes! The campaign provided reach and drove up engagement and conversion. Take a look at the numbers we’ve already achieved.”

PR

• £1.1million in Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) in 2017
• This also compares favourably with the 2016 campaign with just under £1million AVE.

Social

• 1.6 million impressions
• Strong click through rate (CTR) of 1.22%
• Generated 19.9K clicks through social

Engagement

• People viewed 6.8 pages pre-launch and 7.12 pages post-launch in 2017.
• This compares to 4.85 (pre) and 6.55 (post) in 2016.

Conversion

• Conversion rate for pre-launch was also up from 0.5% to 1.03%

What are your top tips when tracking results?

“Ensure correct tagging on site to allow effective measurement to take place. Create a set of benchmarks to measure yourself against. We were able to compare the success of our second season against the first.”

Which aspects of the campaign make you both especially proud?

“Incorporating new digital media in engaging ways – Facebook Live when it had just launched, 360 ThingLink – these were all firsts for the interiors industry.”

What ingredients do you need for a successful brand collaboration?

“It’s so important to work with a brand that shares a similar outlook on design. Henry Holland is completely aware of what generates publicity and he was extremely accommodating in terms of time, access and interviews which allowed us to really create a campaign that had high impact and was beneficial for both Habitat and House of Holland.”

Outside of Habitat, which collaboration do you admire most?

“The H&M collaboration campaign is always fantastic!”

What’s next for the Habitat brand?

“We’re working on future collaborations with relevant personalities. Our collaboration with Laura Jackson and Alice Levine is just about to launch. We’re evolving our blogger events more strategically. We’re also developing our digital content to be more prominent on habitat.co.uk and developing our very popular Habitat Voyeur campaign.”

Does your brand have London connections and a case study you’re ready to share?

Contact CIM’s web editor for London.