Case Study : Ralph Lauren Studio
Building a studio in my spare time
The Set-up
There are two primary marketing creative teams at Ralph Lauren. RL Advertising (RLA) and RL Digital (RLD). I was the Creative Director over RLD. RLA was responsible for campaign images, the monthly Vogue and GQ ad, the Sunday New York Times and all the look-books and styleguides. I oversaw the creative development of anything that appeared on a screen from the website to email marketing and apps. The work flow was such that RLD was very dependent on RLA for photographic assets.
(Images below are from Ralph Lauren Advertising.)
The Situation
In 2012, I was seeing a number of trend lines — Instagram launched their Android app that year and social was gaining in importance in fashion; open rates for emails were skyrocketing on mobile devices; the ecommerce store had a refresh rate that was much more demanding than traditional media; digital had a voracious appetite for content that was only increasing. RLA was not able to keep up with the demand, but RLD would soon become the largest and most important store for Ralph Lauren, dwarfing all the physical flagships, combined, in revenue.
Baby steps. Borrowed time. A corner of the studio. (And lots of push-back)
In 2012 we were outsourcing our photography production to a studio partner downtown. Recognizing that in order to properly service my clients (the merchants of RLD) I needed to figure out a way to create the content that RLA didn’t have bandwidth for. It started off slow, I’d run down to the studio from my midtown office, grab a model and photographer, steel a stool, borrow an apple box — create an asset that met the exacting brand standards of Mr. Lauren while not disrupting the already challenging workflow my studio team had in place. Most people directly involved in the effort weren’t exactly pleased for the additional work. But it was a proof-of-concept period test to see if this route was a viable option.
We had some hits, we had plenty of misses. But we continued to work out the kinks and improve our craft.
We had momentum and wind on our backs, I began spending more time at the studio, the team looked for ways to be creative but efficient. We began receiving requests for shoots from wholesale partners, from categories within the organization that needed imagery but didn’t have the budget for RLA. From scratch, we had developed a new capability within the RLD.
We started receiving requests for content from wholesale partners.
In 2014, in partnership with the Brand Presidents, we re-styled every label and created new specs so each brand would have a distinct look within the expanding world of Ralph Lauren
We continued taking on bigger creative challenges, created original content, improved the quality of our ecommerce store and improved our email marketing.
To prove the scalability of what we were accomplishing at RL Studio — the following images are item-level assets for the Lauren label (RL’s lowest price point), shot at the same speed as the previous non-editorialized photography spec and all before post production. Not only can you build efficient designs systems that can grow, they can also be on brand.
It’s a wrap
In 2015, we amicably expired the agreement with our photo production partner and opened up Ralph Lauren Studio in Long Island City. This is an important narrative for me to tell because I saw an opportunity to increase value for the brand (in the form of increased original quality content) and found a way to ultimately reduce cost, minus the initial capital investment. This was a 3 year journey that begin with the simple desire to find better ways to support the business and offer the RL shopper an aspirational shopping experience.
Thanks for making it this far, dasvidaniya
