Style It Forward

Background

Club 21 is a local luxury retail company with 75 stores in SIngapore. Our community partner is SIngapore Committee for UN Women (UN Women), in particular in the area of preventing violence against women.

Through Club 21 Cares, Club 21's corporate social responsibility (CSR) platform, we partnered with UN Women to run the annual public fashion donation drive, called "Style It Forward"

Donated designer clothing and accessories are sold at Buy To Save, UN Women's annual fundraising sale to support its public education programmes to prevent violence against women.

Challenge

Our budget was extremely limited and our 730 employees are spread over 78 locations (75 stores, two offices and one warehouse). Through our conversations with employees, we realise that many of them did not have enough information about how Style It Forward could help UN Women in its work to prevent gender-based violence. We needed to refresh the campaign and to instill a sense of purposefulness.

Idea

We built upon strong, decentralised leadership across Club 21 and wanted to galvanise team leaders to educate their teams on the cause and motivate them to donate. We also appealed to the competitive streak within our employees and between teams.

The challenge was for each team to work together to donate the highest number of fashion piece per head.

The end result was pretty amazing.

With a limited budget, we purchased raw materials (kraft paper, scissors, double sided tape) to create a handcrafted personalised Style It Forward kraft bags. 49 bags were handcrafted (cut, stuck and assembled) for every team leader.

We even made bags appropriate for each gender! A tote for the ladies, and a brieftcase for the men. The hangtag explained the competition and the cause of preventing violence against women.

To launch the campaign, we hand-delivered each bag and explained the purpose of Style It Forward to each team leader. They were all caught by surprise, which was the intended effect.

Each team had one week to gather alll their collections. The reaction from our staff was amazing. They not only raided their own wardrobes, but reached out to their friends and families too. With increased awareness of the campaign and cause, they were also able to actively promote it to customers with confidence.

Club 21 has been partnering with UN Women for Style It Forward for five years and this campaign revitalised the programme. Employees are now advocates for Style It Forward, knowledgeable about the issue of gender-based violence and are eagerly awaiting the next Style It Forward event in May 2015.