Heading into 2014, CB2 was experiencing major growth. While love for the brand was high among a small circle of customers, its size and budget limited its ability to be heard above competitors who owned clearer points of view on home design. The challenge was simple: to win more minds and hearts for CB2 with less money.

Our audience felt less confident in mixing and matching styles and relied upon online communities for design inspiration, claiming they greatly influenced personal decision-making. So we created APT CB2: the first-ever apartment designed entirely through Pinterest in the real world, in real time.

With over 663 million impressions as a result of our campaign we vastly overcame our campaign benchmark of making 2.3 million more people aware of CB2.

Within a social landscape that can often be seen as passive, we measured a 52% increase in activity on the Pinterest platform alone. Even greater was the number of re-pins (31,000), signifying a natural and organic endorsement behavior on the platform–and a metric far beyond the mediocre brand average.

Our intended awareness campaign also succeeded in a 21% addition to CB2’s email database–the largest growth in opt-in the brand has ever seen.

Over the course of 5 days, CB2 worked with 5 Pinterest influencers to lead the design of one room each day. Every hour, for 12 hours, influencers would share CB2 product pins with their communities on Pinterest, simultaneously cross-posting on CB2’s owned channels and APTCB2.com. At the end of each hour, the item that received the most likes was placed into the apartment until the room design was complete. The campaign was also supported by Progress and Accent Pins showing the hourly design progress of each room, which integrated organically into the native content of the Pinterest platform.

With our audience increasingly looking for values-driven brands to engage with, we needed to create an opportunity for CB2 that clarified the company’s beliefs in experimentation, conversation and collaboration. From there, CB2 could begin to invite even more people to fulfill their design potential and grow their following exponentially and with a broader community.

We knew that many of them dreamed and designed on Pinterest, so we created a campaign specifically for the platform, targeting an active community that already existed–the popular inspiration site was currently delivering more visitors to CB2.com than any other social destination.