Over the last month we’ve been working with Fullrange to deliver a creative concept  which will run across TV and overlap online with a new area added to the Style Birmingham site. Working with Fullrange has been an absolute pleasure and we hope there’ll be more opportunities to collaborate on projects for other clients in the coming months.

Once the ad airs we’ll post some more information about the Christmas campaign as a whole, and of course, post the ad itself.

In the meantime, here’s a few teaser shots from the shoot – as you can see, it was a fair old setup, so hopefully the final product will be well received!

Being responsible for the fantastic photos there’s more to read over on Steve’s site as well as the official press release on Rewired’s site.

Our involvement has been predominantly on the accompanying brochure, map and outdoor advertising to help promote the campaign (more images to follow).

The Celebrate Independents exhibition launches today at High Street and New Street Birmingham, and runs until the end of the month. A special fashion show featuring Independent Retailers will take place at Radisson SAS Hotel, supported by Harvey Nichols, on Wednesday 8 July.

Following on from our recent win for the Style Birmingham account we’re pleased to announce the launch of the new campaign and website.

There are quite a few elements to the creative and so we thought it might be interesting for people to show how we’ve tackled the project in the last month, from winning the pitch through to delivering the goods!

Always in Style

When we pitched, our response needed to meet several requirements – these were to come up with a through the line campaign which would include a brand refresh, a series of outdoor adverts and a new website which made more of what was going on in retail in the city. Historically we felt that some of the creative had been a bit apologetic – Birmingham has a lot to shout about and we didn’t want to automatically assume that people needed a ‘value’ led campaign to be enticed in to the city during a recession. Instead, we wanted the new creative to be aspirational and position Birmingham as a retail leader within the UK.

Taking all this in to account we developed ‘Always in Style’ – a confident and factual statement about the city, it’s retailers and the experience visitors should expect when visiting the city to shop. Secondly, we decided to deviate from the previous location based shots on the high street, and opted for a classic white studio look, photographing the ‘Always in Style’ message in situ with the clothes.

We’ll hopefully get some better shots of the billboards when the weather’s nicer!….

Approach

To make sure that the retailers were given a sense of inclusion and ownership over what we were planning (it’s their city after all!) we invited key shops to supply clothing for the summer season. This way the ads would not only represent what’s available in the shops, but also become seasonally responsive. The plan therefore from here on in is to produce an entire new set of visuals for each new fashion season – no more regurgitating the same adverts over and over again, the city changes seasonally and therefore so should the ads.

Next, we selected models for both the website and outdoor ads who would reflect the spread of retailers in the city. As well as being multi-generational the cities shops span high end designer labels, major high street stores and cutting edge independent retailers. As such, we tried to select models who would match these different sectors of the cities retail experience.

On the day we also shot a little time lapse video, plus some other footage…

Style Birmingham Summer Fashion Shoot 2009 from Style Birmingham on Vimeo.

Digital development

In addition to the outdoor media above there are a range of things planned for the coming 12 months on the digital front.

Currently, we’ve built a brand new website to replace what was already there and add a few new features. As well as the expected standard directory, news and other areas we’ve also included a new SMS service, blogs and a community driven Q&A section which we hope will start to involve people more in sharing their shopping experiences and opinions. We’ve also opened up comments on popular shop listings and are encouraging Retail Birmingham where possible to aggregate and link through to news items which may be of interest from the wider web. In the interests of transparency these sources will always be cited and news stories will always contain an excerpt, never copied in full. As with all site launches, these are baby steps towards where we want the site to eventually be, but communities don’t grow overnight and we think we’re at least now pointing in the right direction.

In terms of design we’ve tried to continue the emphasis from the outdoor ads and include the family of models and seasonal clothing wherever possible. As with the billboards, the site will get a facelift with each new fashion season, inheriting new videos, photos and colour schemes to suit wherever the fashion trends are at that stage.

We’re really excited about what’s been a very busy month and have really enjoyed getting stuck in to what we hope will be a successful twelve month campaign. Oh, and don’t forget to take a look around the site!

We’re pleased to announce that 383 Project has been appointed as the new creative agency for Style Birmingham. After a hotly contested pitch process we were delighted to be selected to work on the years campaign and are looking forward to getting stuck in to the brand, advertising and website relaunch in the next couple of months. A big well done also goes to the guys at rewired who’ve been appointed as the new PR agency. Here’s the full press release:

Retail Birmingham has appointed two regional agencies to carry out a new creative, web and PR campaign on behalf of the organisation and its brand, Style Birmingham.

383 Project and Rewired PR, both based in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, were selected after a multi-agency pitch.

The campaign will include a re-brand for Style Birmingham, a fresh advertising creative, development of a new, interactive website, and year round PR, events and promotions to raise awareness of Birmingham’s retail offer and drive footfall across the city’s stores.

Retail Birmingham Business Improvement District was launched in 2007, and is a not for profit company representing over 1,000 retailers including Bullring, The Mailbox, Pallasades, Pavillions, Great Western Arcade and Picadilly Arcade.

Kevin Breese, General Manager at Harvey Nichols and chair of Retail Birmingham’s marketing group, said: “Retail Birmingham represents the entire spectrum, from designer fashion to leading high street names and independent stores.

“We wanted to appoint a marketing and PR team that would have the expertise, creativity and energy to support retailers through the current climate and maintain Birmingham’s leading position as the UK’s shopping destination of choice outside London.”

“Both 383 Project and Rewired PR impressed us with their original approach and ability to create fresh campaigns that will have real resonance for the city’s retail sector.”

John Newbold, Creative Director at 383 Project said:
“It’s an exciting time to be promoting the retail offer within the city. Building on our previous work with Retail Birmingham we’re keen to create a campaign which plays to Birmingham’s strengths and increases the brand perception on both a regional and national level.”

Ruth Ward, Managing Director of Rewired PR said:
“Having experienced Birmingham’s retail renaissance first hand over the past decade, it’s fantastic to have the opportunity to promote the city in this way. We’re looking forward to generating even greater interest in Birmingham as a shopping destination, from its big brands to the hidden gems.”

After a lot of hard work over the last few months we’re delighted to announce the launch of the new Retail Birmingham website. 383 have been redeveloping this site for quite some time, working with the Retail BID (Business Improvement District) to help communicate more effectively with retailers and provide an overview of the role of the BID to other web users. The BID itself covers 700 retail outlets and major centres including the Bullring, Mailbox, Pallasades and Pavilions (see below). Retail Birmingham also work closely with Marketing Birmingham to help coordinate and manage a number of other projects including Style Birmingham (that’s a lot of ‘Birminghams’!). The news area is well worth checking out given Retail Birmingham’s overarching of lots of other well know sites. A lot of the remaining content is ‘members only’ and so we’re limited on what we can show here…sorry!