LIDL
THE CROISSANT BAG
BRIEF
How do you keep Lidl as the most famous, loved and spoken about supermarket in the UK? By becoming a supermarket people don’t only need but love and feel proud to shop at.
Lidl has long been synonymous with low prices, a perception often mistakenly tied to lesser quality. But in recent years, through bold, culture-driven campaigns, we’ve turned that notion on its head. Our strategy is to show that you’re not trading down when you shop at Lidl you’re trading up. Because we’re big on quality, but Lidl on price.
IDEA
Enter the Croissant Handbag: Designed in collaboration with provocateur designer Nik Bentel, it wasn’t just an accessory, it was a cultural moment that merged the worlds of luxury fashion and affordable shops.
The campaign unfolded in three simple phases:
Phase 1: Pre-Launch Hype: We launched the news of the release three days ahead of the bags being available to blanket coverage, including a full page exclusive in The Times. But it wasn’t just the Nationals driving conversation, we also had the hype and fashion titles, and thousands of unpaid organic social posts. The bag went viral.
Phase 2: The Sellout: Over 10,000 people were queueing online the minute before the bags dropped, with a sellout announced as soon as the orders could be digitally processed. The Bentel Team said it was the most traffic they had ever had for a single launch.
Phase 3: The London Fashion Week Pop-Up: Knowing we were going to launch our own pop-up - patisserie Lidl - to hijack the conversation even more, we held back exclusive units only for IRL customers. The result was queues around four corners across both days. You’d have thought it was LV or Supreme. People came, camped and resold. Everyone got a baked treat.
RESULTS
Every major UK national covered the campaign - loads of them multiple times - from The BBC to the Guardian and Telegraph to the Daily Mail. It had a whole two-minute segment on This Morning.
To put that in hard numbers, we achieved over 40 national hits. 262 pieces of coverage. A combined earned reach of 811 million. And a whopping 12,370,015 social impressions.
