Lyst launches inaugural ad campaign and hires Paddy Power MD as first CMO
Fashion ecommerce platform Lyst has launched its first brand advertising campaign and brought on board former Paddy Power MD Christian Woolfenden to head up its marketing.
Lyst, which has an inventory of over 3 million fashion products across 11,000 designers, will run the Anomaly-created campaign for a month across a variety of media, including billboards in New York and London using local data insights, print executions, taxi media and experiential street marketing as well as global social and influencer marketing campaigns.
The creative is a departure from more conventional high fashion advertising and centres on 10 images that are accompanied by tongue-in-cheek headlines driven by Lyst's data observation capabilities. For example the tagline “Rip Off” references the 6x increase of shoppers searching on Lyst for velcro shoes, and “Pointless” for square and round-toed shoe sales figures. “Bell End” highlights London searches for flared jeans.
Chris Morton, chief executive and co-founder, of Lyst said of the campaign: “Our success to date has been driven by marrying insights from data science with the emotional nature of fashion. The campaign is a manifestation of this; in it these two worlds are combined in a seemingly dissonant form, celebrating the power of beautiful fashion imagery and the intelligent insights into the fashion consumer’s behavior. As a challenger brand we wanted to ensure our marketing was as disruptive as our product.”
Meanwhile, Woolfenden will join the company in January 2016 when he will oversee all global communications, organic acquisition, performance and brand marketing.
Before joining Paddy Power he worked as global brand director at Bacardi. He said: “Lyst is an incredibly exciting company - whose phenomenal growth to date has meant that it is at the centre of the fashion commerce space. The team were smart enough to focus on the product and technology first and I am delighted to be joining at a time when marketing really becomes a focus globally, building upon the great work that has been started with this campaign and driving the brand forward."