Eton Shirts, a Swedish brand founded in 1928, offers premium men's shirts, accessories, and a small selection of men's clothing. Historically, the brand has seen success in the European market through wholesale distribution and, more recently, direct-to-consumer e-commerce and physical stores. With a strategic focus on its online store as a key growth engine, Eton Shirts also aims to expand geographically, including in the highly competitive US market where the brand has only 1% unaided awareness.

To increase Eton Shirts’ impact in the US market, dominated by significantly larger competitor brands, the brand needed to increase sales on its e-commerce platform through innovative thinking. With a relatively small investment and a short campaign period of fewer than three weeks, this campaign’s objective was to start growing the number of e-commerce customers – the first step of several towards a total goal of 5,000 new customers within a year.

The core idea of The Index Shirt was to connect the price of the garment to the stock market, allowing it to rise and fall with market fluctuations. The value of the limited-edition shirt was pegged to the Nasdaq Index, updating every five minutes on trading days. By feeding real-time data into our pricing model, we transformed an otherwise ordinary purchasing moment into a uniquely branded trading experience.

Our idea not only provided a never-before-seen e-commerce experience but also integrated real-time data into the entire campaign ecosystem. With strategically placed dynamic ads, we showed how the price of the shirt fluctuated in real-time, inserting ourselves into our target group’s every relevant context. Whether they were ‘doomscrolling’ for financial news, reading their favorite business and fashion publications, or visiting their social feeds and go-to meme accounts, The Index Shirt popped up, triggering them to strike when the price was right.

Eton Shirts aimed to reach 30-something-year-old men in finance and professional services, a notoriously hard-to-reach audience with little time for brands. And they had stopped buying shirts: during Covid-19, Eton Shirts’ revenue had declined by 50%.

Our strategic focus was to embrace a new way of communicating the brand. Through social listening, we tracked the interactions of our niche audience to identify a unifying approach and found a common denominator: they were both mentally and financially invested in the stock market. And 2022 was one of the most turbulent years on the stock market in decades.

This led to our key insight: to reach this audience, we shouldn’t compete with the dominant narrative but rather insert ourselves into the conversation. Talking to an affluent group less affected by economic turmoil, we allowed ourselves to be playful, building our campaign on stock market volatility and a “Trade Now" call to action.

Our campaign implemented a unique e-commerce solution that fed the Nasdaq index into the pricing model of our limited edition shirt. Data from the Index Shirt site was fed into an ad display system, showing customers the shirt's fluctuating price in real-time. This increased the click-through rate and added an element of thrill to encourage engagement and purchase.

The campaign was launched during a challenging period for retailers, from November 16 to December 12, when consumers wait for discounts associated with Black Friday week. We leveraged multiple channels, including influencer marketing, display advertising, PR, META, YouTube, and Twitter, to execute the campaign. To ensure clear and efficient messaging, we focused on small-scale niche targeting of consumers who could influence a larger audience. A thorough media narrative was crafted around the experience, giving business, lifestyle, fashion and broad news outlets a novel story on the unexpected pairing of finance and fashion.

The Index Shirt delivered impressive results on every level, from business to communication. Within three weeks, the shirt sold out and became the best-selling seasonal item of 2022. The campaign led to a 42% increase in new customer acquisition and an 18% growth in returning customers. Additionally, organic new user traffic to the Eton website skyrocketed by 98.4% during the campaign's first week, making it the second-best week that year despite being the week before Black Week. There was a 120% increase in search queries – reaching an all-time record for Eton. Social traffic to the website was also the highest year-to-date, with a 14.7% CTR on YouTube advertising. Furthermore, the campaign launch newsletter had an impressive 8.3% CTR, leading to an all-time record of newsletter-driven traffic. Lastly, the unexpected combination of finance and fashion resulted in a PR reach of 142M, valued at 1,315,942 USD.