Esprit’s casual, relaxed stylings would lose every single time when pitted against the high-glamour advertising of H&M and Zara (both of which have been taking market share away from Esprit in China for the past 5 years). So, we decided to do what the competitors are not doing and go with a low-glamour strategy.

The idea was called #ImPerfect. You can read it both ways: I’m perfect, or imperfect. It tells consumers to accept their own imperfections as their own perfections.

On Meipai, we invited Millennial women to put on their makeup, start the video camera on their phones, pose for a few seconds, then pause the camera. They would then go remove their makeup, come back to their phones, start the video camera again, and pose for a few more seconds. To give this #ImPerfect video selfie momentum, we enlisted celebrity actress Ning Chang and 70 other influencers to take the challenge.

Meipai helped us by featuring our celebrity and influencer videos on the first page of their app for the entire campaign duration of 3 weeks.

We reinforced participation by posting posters and stickers at all 600 Esprit stores in China.

UGC Submissions: 100,000+ Meipai users uploaded videos

Reach: 83 million views of our videos

Engagement: 1.2 million likes

Sales: best sales season since 2010 in China

Achievement: 3.7x ROI vs buying the same number of views in preroll ads