AMV BBDO + Birdsong

Building customer loyalty by putting selfies at the heart of e-commerce

"I found the learnings around how consultancies work and putting that into a real environment to be most beneficial. But everything was valuable!”

Jamie Webber, Innovation & Business Development Director, AMV BBDO

The Team

Birdsong is an ethical fashion brand that sources its garments exclusively from women’s groups and charities—think knitting grannies and migrant seamstresses—and pays them above the London Living Wage. It caters to the fashion-forward feminist, showcasing its designs on unedited models of every shape, size and colour. In other words, no sweatshop and no photoshop.

We paired Birdsong up with a team from AMV BBDO, Britain's biggest ad agency.

The Brief

Increase the brand's share of repeat customers in order to reduce acquisition cost and improve margins.

Applying business strategy and design thinking methods learned in the WORKShops, AMV discovered that the main reason people weren't buying from Birdsong more than once was because customers weren't confident enough about quality and sizing across the range—not uncommon for a new brand, especially when its garments are handmade.

The Solution

Social proof. Using design sprint tools introduced in the WORKShops, AMV leveraged the thousands of Birdsong fans sharing thoughts and selfies on social media. By capturing great user-generated content to share with potential customers in the right place at the right time, the brand could show that women like them trust, wear and love Birdsong products.

As part of the WORKShops, AMV prototyped and live-tested a system for collecting photos of customers wearing Birdsong via email and Instagram, as well as an improved e-commerce experience. In addition to providing better information on fit, fabric and makers online, customer selfies are showcased alongside professionally photographed models to give shoppers more confidence in each product.

The Impact

Soon after they started implementing AMV's ideas, Birdsong's customer loyalty rate nearly doubled. Not only has the solution proved commercially effective—it lives up to Birdsong's aim of showing the reality of women, and helps the brand stand out even more as a standard bearer for tackling the unhealthy body standards of the fashion industry.

"We've come away with concrete actions that will help us develop and become more structurally sound as a company.”

Sophie Slater, Co-founder, Birdsong