UT Gallery

Uniqlo was perceived as mainstream, middle of the road and of little interest to the cool trendsetters who give retailers such as Topshop their wow. It needed to add cachet to the brand and created a sub-brand UT comprising a new range of 30 designer T-shirts made by credible talents.

In order to persuade fashionistas to buy into the new range it also needed to create an experience they would value and it couldn’t do that via its existing stores which were all in the West End of London.

The solution was to treat the t-shirts as art in its own right and set up a pop-up gallery in Hoxton, the heart of cool London. The campaign used localised outdoor media and style magazines to entice them in and amplified the gallery’s mainstream cool via free papers such as Metro and London Lite – highlighting the fact that the UT range was also available in its West End stores.

The exhibition featured a selection of images from Uniqlo’s global advertising campaign for UT, with the t-shirts placed minimally on racks to give a premium gallery feel. It was open for one month.

Sales via the gallery and main London store exceeded the target by 400% and individual designs featured in the campaign sold out within a week. The campaign also put Uniqlo on the fashion radar, leading to a 75% uplift in PR coverage.