HEMA founded the summerschool Vlog Academy: an online and offline platform where young people are taught all the ins and outs about vlogging during the back to school season. HEMA wants to help young people carry out their personal identity with their school supplies. Nowadays your personal identity is more than just physical objects, it’s also the online environment where HEMA helped them to create their online identity.

The Vlog Academy consisted of eight lessons taught by eight well-known influencers as teachers in a pop-up classroom in the flagship stores of HEMA (also live on YouTube) that are concluded with a homework assignment. Each lesson contained a specific skill or topic for teens to start or improve their own vlog channel. The HEMA shops became a playground for teens which stimulated them to give a thumbs up to their own creativity and subscribe to their own identity.

The school season for HEMA runs from May till September. Which is quite a long run to keep the target audience -known for their low attention span- interested. That’s why we developed the idea of a summer school: the Vlog Academy follows the timetable with eight lessons concluded with a homework assignment and an exam.

We broadened HEMA's owned media where Dutch teens between 12-18 year old are already present; Snapchat and Youtube. The Academy got it’s own page on the HEMA website where all the content was collected. The lessons were held both offline in the stores as online live on YouTube. With a popular influencer as Snapchat reporter during the whole summer driving teenagers to the lessons every week and activating them to participate in Q&A’s. Snapchat challenges in the stores to drive teenagers to the online platform and to keep them engaged.

Following the eight lessons, participating in homework assignments, submitting Q&A questions and participating in challenges, demanded a great deal of patience and effort from the target group. A target group that is known for a short attention span and an urge for instant gratification. Yet thousands of young people participated this summer with the HEMA Vlog Academy via YouTube, Snapchat and in the stores. In addition to following the lessons, almost 8,000 snaps were sent by the teens to the HEMA account with the various assignments, Q & A's with the influencer teachers, giveaways and the instore challenges. The Snapcodes in the store have been scanned almost 9,000 times, which shows that young people in the store are also actively involved with the school stuff and campaign. In addition, two brand new influencers have been contracted by an influencer agency.