The Collective wins Gold for ‘Best Rebrand of a Digital Property’ at The Transform Awards Europe 2020

The prestigious awards are presented to best practice in corporate, product and global brand development work, with categories that focus on strategy, execution, content and evaluation. 

Companies and agencies entering the Transform Awards have their work benchmarked against their peers and stand out amongst their competitors, rewarding excellence across the whole brand development process.

The Collective is a company at the forefront of the ‘co-living’ movement, creating community spaces for members to live and work in, with three locations across London and New York. 

They came to Matter Of Form (MOF) seeking a new website that would reflect their recent rebrand, showcase the different locations in detail, as well as the new direction of offering both long term and short term stays. The site would need to clearly communicate the brand philosophy, and improve all aspects of design, site architecture, analytics, SEO, and CRM.

The buildings are designed to encourage like-minded individuals to live as a community in ‘connected spaces’ –naturally attracting young professionals, globetrotters and digital nomads. Digital and technology are at the forefront of bringing members together and integrating aspects of the service proposition.

The original website caused confusion about The Collective’s offering, deterring bookings. The website lacked visuals to help explain to, and inspire interest, in prospect members.

The Collective needed a new website to utilise interactive content to communicate the different offerings in line with the new brand direction. MOF wanted to showcase how the ‘offline’ guidelines could work effectively in the digital realm and create a unique design. The KPI objectives were to increase bookings (guest tours & short term stays) and reduce bounce rates.

Our stakeholder workshops gathered business requirements and the mystery shopper tour at The Collective in Willesden Junction helped us identify the key personas and user journeys, which we translated into an experience map from brand awareness, service consideration, booking to stay.

As a result, we were able to find some unique ideas for the site design. This included a 360* video of each location, through the lens of a carousel module to guide you through different areas of the building as if you were there.

We decided to take the user on a journey of ‘a day in the life’ of a member to inspire and highlight the shared experiences on offer within the community, from morning yoga on the rooftop to networking drinks in the evening.

We platformed the website on AWS due to its server-less application architecture, scalability and cost-effectiveness.The stack is comprised of a headless CMS (Kentico Cloud) feeding content into a powerful Vue.js front-end that is SEO and performance optimised by using Vue.js’ very own SSR engine - Nuxt. The decision to use this approach was two-fold. Firstly, The Collective did not want another system to manage, therefore a server-less approach was the appropriate choice. Secondly, we wanted to create a ground-breaking platform that would give us more creative freedom in regards to the design and user-experience.

Check out our award-winning work by visiting: www.thecollective.com

As a result of our research for The Collective, this has prompted Matter Of Form’s work in the ‘Future of Living & Work’ space and our latest whitepaper project ‘Building Tomorrow. Today’.

About Matter Of Form

At MOF we’re passionate about creating exceptional brand-led experiences that leverage our knowledge, design methodologies and the latest in what technology has to offer in terms of human interactions and business efficiencies.

Download a copy of our latest thought leadership pieces ‘The Future of Adventure and Exploration’, ‘Staying Ahead of the Game: Top 10 Trends in Retail’, ‘Eat, Stay, Shop’ and ‘Building Tomorrow. Today’. 

If you’d like to discuss how Matter Of Form partner to provide strategic design and tech services, please get in touch via hello@matterofform.com to arrange a time to speak with our team of consultants or visit www.matterofform.com. 

For Press and Media enquiries, please contact Emma Blackmore, Group Marketing Director: emma@matterofform.com.