Anniversary Sale

My Role: Creative Strategist and Lead Designer

The Anniversary Sale is Nordstrom’s biggest sale of the year. It’s not your normal clearance event since it features new fall merchandise from leading brands on sale for a limited time. I was the creative strategist and lead concept designer working with cross-functional teams to design and execute multi-channel deliverables.

The Challenge: Historically, the Anniversary Sale was a huge success, driving sales during the slower summer months. However, traditions were changing with the rise of price matching and rapidly growing online competition. The Anniversary Sale was making smaller and smaller gains as the years progressed. Leadership realized the sale needed to be recharged to stimulate existing customers and to attract new customers especially in regards to Nordstrom’s entry into new markets like Puerto Rico and Canada.

Goals:

Target messages for retention and acquisition by region
Demonstrate value in a clear and compelling way
Make the sale easier to navigate online and in-store
Visually revitalize the sale

Actions: I designed key components for the campaign including logo usage, graphics, typography, and a signature yellow color palette. I redesigned homepage navigation that gave customers more direct choices to shop by category, brand, or department with a simple click. Working closely with the writer, we created headlines and institutional copy targeted to regions. Ads prominently featured price points and institutional copy clearly defined how the sale worked. Coinciding campaigns like Back to School were fully integrated into the sale including Loyalty events such as Early Access. To give stores more time to merchandise and to free up product, model cutouts of key items were used for visual merchandising display.

The Outcome:

Sales increased by 7% to over $1 billion
Yellow is the defining color for Anniversary Sale and continues to this day
Increase in online traffic with modest gains in stores
Model cutouts replaced mannequin presentations, freeing up product and giving stores more time to focus on merchandising