As UK lockdowns forced women to stay home, many started investing in skincare. This created an opportunity for No7, which is sold exclusively at Boots, one of the few retailers allowed to remain open. Yet, despite having an in-store distribution channel and high brand awareness at precisely the right cultural moment, profitability for its No7 Laboratories line were down 48%.

To address this urgent gap, No7 was planning to push in-store sales for Line Correcting Booster Serum (LCBS), one of its best-selling products. However, when the UK tightened lockdown restrictions, limiting foot traffic just weeks before the campaign launch, No7 needed to quickly pivot.

No7 gave us 4 weeks to develop and launch a new integrated campaign to boost online sales of LCBS by +250%. We had three barriers: timing was tight, film crews posed health risks during lockdown, and there was nothing new to highlight about the 3-year-old product.

We wanted to execute this creative idea by representing life in lockdown, and the solution was staring us in the face. Zoom is not just a video conferencing app, it’s a mirror that forces us to look at ourselves, so we flipped that mirror, bringing women together to talk about self-image using Zoom. We set out to capture our cultural insight by showing women alone…together.

With the help of dermatologists, we found that 60% of UK women noticed new wrinkles on their face during the pandemic. So we coined the term ‘lockdown lines,’ positioned our product as the unique solution to these wrinkles, and set out to give real women something small they could use to reclaim some control over their lives.

This campaign represented a fundamental shift for No7’s product-focused advertising. And our gamble paid off: these activities helped us reach beyond our core audience to generate record sales.