A kids' fashion startup with zero awareness and a summer collection to launch. The strategy gave it the visual vocabulary of an established fashion house before it had earned the right to one.
Hopscotch was an Indian kids' fashion e-commerce startup. No brand awareness. A summer collection to launch. The task: build share of voice and brand presence fast enough to drive meaningful revenue from a standing start.
Hopscotch thought it was a startup. A scrappy challenger trying to carve out space in a market dominated by established players. The first thing I did was listen. I sat with their call centre team and what I heard changed everything.
People weren't calling to complain — which is what call centres are usually for. They were calling for advice. 'What should my daughter wear to this?' 'Does this go with that?' They were treating Hopscotch like a fashion label — without the haughtiness, without the drama.
The brand customers had built in their heads was already more sophisticated than the brand Hopscotch thought it was. We didn't invent the faux fashion show. We just held a mirror up.
A campaign film presented the Hopscotch summer collection as a faux high-fashion runway show — with all the production trappings, styling, and gravitas of a premium adult fashion house. In a category with no established visual language, the opportunity was to borrow the codes of the fashion industry wholesale. Kids' fashion had never been treated with the same creative seriousness as adult fashion. That gap was the strategy.
A brand launch that punched well above its weight. The fact that they were invited to Lakmé Fashion Week the following year — long after I'd moved on — told me the mirror was pointed in the right direction.