TOUS x Friends

Developing friendship as the basis of a joint creative experience

The first step of our collaboration with Tous was to define what Tous’ notion of friendship would look like, while basing it on data and insights we collected about Gen Z friendships and phygital activations. We conducted extensive and comprehensive market research and competitor benchmarking, as well as drew upon real Gen Z feedback to help steer the direction of the project. Through a series of joint creative sessions with the Tous team, we shaped a narrative that would approach friendship through the open act of sharing - viewing friendship as a form of abundance rather than exclusivity, where a friend group is a fluid, open space of creativity and inspiration rather than a closed, nuclear bubble. This led us to settle on the idea of a shared jewelry box as the key concept of the experience.

The main part of our collaboration with Tous was creating an in-store experience that would be put on display in the Tous store on the Rambla de Catalunya in Barcelona, for all customers to interact with. Essentially, friend groups would go in and answer a short questionnaire about their jewelry choices, friendship vibe, and overall lifestyle, in order to then obtain a curated selection of pieces: their shared jewelry box. The goal of the experience, which lasted about ten minutes, was to make the act of buying Tous jewelry go beyond a mere purchase, and turn it into an exciting, emotional, and collective moment between friends. Rather than viewing jewelry pieces as individual, exclusive ornaments, the idea was to imagined shareable items, that bring friends together.

We conceptualised, designed and developed the full experience, handling and deciding every detail and aspect such that it would all align alongside an overall “Gen Z” verbal identity. In fact, this created a whole new way of speaking for Tous - in the sense that through our various design choices, from sound design, to copywriting, colours and visual icons, emerged a new Tous tone of voice that felt a lot more approachable and appealing to a younger audience, but in a natural, casual way. 
 

Verbally, this went through using slang words and a fun, informal tone. On the design side, we played with group chat stickers, emojis, bright pink shadows, to visual convey a more youthful side of Tous. We also implemented a kind of technology that would allow multiple users to simultaneously answer the questionnaire on their individual phone devices, and then analyse the answers in realtime, a system which we had never worked with before, but that echoed this Kahoot-style game technology that’s been trending recently.

In tandem with the in-store experience, we extended this Gen Z Tous tone of voice to a communications campaign for Tous’ social media accounts. We led the creative direction of the campaign, providing guidelines for copy and language, overseeing art direction, writing the script for one of the campaign videos, and assisting to the creation of another of the campaign videos featuring a group of Barcelona-based influencers.