Brief Explanation

Haircare brand KMS California was falling out of favour with stylists, with many salons choosing to recommend newer products to customers. Our business challenge was to turn uninterested stylists into passionate brand advocates. As well as simultaneously engage with our end consumer in-store. In short, we needed to make KMS California cool again. In terms of channel selection nothing was mandated, but we believed a direct approach with a strong social component would allow us to create the kind of deep engagement necessary to truly shift brand perception.

The Brief

The brief from KMS in 2013 asked that we create uplift in sales through a trade engagement campaign. We needed to build the relevance of the KMS brand within the trade as well as make it more desirable for the end consumer in-store. The brief was wide open as to how we achieved this.

How the final design was conceived

To achieve this we decided to create a pop culturally relevant campaign to connect stylists with our brand idea of ‘play.’ And so the KMS Shags were born, a range of shaggy dolls in desperate need of some styling help. We delivered dolls to salons across Australia. They came in specially designed boxes with messaging that encouraged them to style their KMS Shag using the HAIRPLAY range before sharing the results on Instagram with prizes to be won for the most creative entries. We saw this as an ‘open-source’ approach to design, creating a canvas for our creative audience to build a playful, colourful and surprising world for KMS.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The campaign exploded with thousands of unique entries styled and uploaded to Instagram, establishing an extraordinary 38% redemption rate. They were even picked up by Australia’s coolest retailer General Pants and sold in-store as a stand alone, KMS branded product. But most importantly, sales were up 27% on last year. Our previously unengaged stylists had become true brand advocates, each spending hours with our brand perfecting their style and then sharing it with their social networks and customers in-store.