Founded in 1989, G-Star RAW (more commonly known as G-Star) is a Dutch, denim-focused, high quality fashion brand. Today, they are an undisputed leader in the market with 400+ G-Star franchise stores, 6,500+ selling points worldwide, and numerous collaborations and campaigns with celebrities such as hip hop legend Snoop Dogg, world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, actress Liv Tyler, racing driver Max Verstappen, and many more.
G-Star is constantly innovating and finding new ways to stay on top of a competitive market. In early 2021, partners Smartly.io and Flowbox saw the potential in collaborating and started working on a campaign to help G-Star feature authentic, on-brand content from real users and brand ambassadors in dynamic product ads on social media.
G-Star RAW tested a combination of user generated content (UGC) and image templates in their dynamic product ads (DPA), as opposed to standard white background product images they had previously used and saw greatly improved results. With an increase of 18% in conversion rate, 16% in ROAS, and 14% in CTR, the fashion giant decided to expand beyond the initial testing into further implementation across their campaigns.
Like many other ecommerce businesses, G-Star used standard white background product images for their dynamic product ads, however, realizing the increasing importance and relevance of influencer content, they felt the need to try something new.
When creating a typical dynamic product ad for social media, marketers are often restricted by the availability or technical limitations of using non-product images. So, if marketers want to include photos that aren’t standard white backgrounds, they would need to import their UGC as product images, which can be quite difficult without a service such as Flowbox.
With Smartly.io and Flowbox's combined technologies, G-Star launched a two-month long DPA campaign featuring UGC and branded visuals to a specific target audience in their German market.
Here’s how it worked: Flowbox helped G-Star automatically source and curate content from followers on social media, which was readily available to be used for multiple marketing purposes. In this case, moderated content from Flowbox was exported as an XML product feed, which G-Star then imported into Smartly.io’s advertising platform. From there, Smartly.io’s image templates were used to automatically add branding elements to the UGC sources provided by Flowbox, resulting in a full catalog of authentic and on-brand content.
Bert Van Eetvelde
Lead Paid Social
When customers convert through the Flowbox catalog, they spend more within the campaign itself, and with Smartly.io’s image templates applied on the UGC, the campaign’s on-brand look and feel conformed to G-Star’s brand guidelines.
Since partnering with Smartly.io and Flowbox, G-Star has reported amazing results, seeing a 14-18% increase in metrics like CTR, ROAS, and CR, because of this, G-Star decided to expand the initiative to the Dutch market (their home base) as well.
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