Hammitt

Community is the centre of Hammitt, and fun is the tone of it — a look at their social channels settles that in about four seconds. What they wanted was somewhere to put that: a standing place inside their own website where fans gather and new releases are shown, in the brand's own voice.

The hard part was never the idea. It was finding a platform that would let the content stay theirs and appear natively on their site rather than on somebody else's feed. They had already pencilled in a competitor when the conversation with us started.

Hammitt now broadcasts from hammitt.com. Events and their shoppable product rows are built in an app, go out live worldwide, and are recorded the moment they end — so every show becomes evergreen stock in a library customers can shop months later. A moderator works the chat beside the host and pins products as they come up, and each event is re-streamed to Facebook and Instagram to bring an audience back to the site rather than leave it there.

Sales and viewership land in Hammitt's own dashboard, which is what makes the programme survive a budget meeting: commissioning hosts and working out the return on an event are automatic rather than somebody's spreadsheet.

Hammitt unified its content strategy in six months and grew the programme to three shows a week. Live shopping stopped being a campaign and became a channel: conversion, engagement, returns and time on site all moved the right way.

More than 115 live events later, the interesting part is where the sales now come from. The live shows are promoted and they perform — but an increasing share of revenue arrives through the recordings, which keep selling long after the event is over. From the bottom line, Hammitt sees an 8× return on investment.