In late 2014, Citizen Watches opened up a flagship store in New York City located in Times Square on Broadway. It follows a trend of major companies who existed primarily in the wholesale business (selling watches mostly via third-party retailers such as department stores) to open up a few “mono-brand” boutiques in key markets in order to create special brand experiences for customers. As part of a new retail concept, Citizen asked aBlogtoWatch to work with them in creating a “blogger wall” at the new Citizen watches flagship store in NYC.
Citizen also integrated some of their efforts with the recent (and clever) Better Starts Now campaign that I discussed on Forbes here. #BetterStartsNow is one of the smartest marketing campaigns I’ve seen in a while and should set a bar for major brands when it comes to producing a message that speaks to core customers as well as novices to the brand. Citizen specifically wanted aBlogtoWatch to showcase how its team wears and lives with watches. The way we interpreted that was to work with Citizen to design a visual experience that helps guests in the stores understand the activities and purposes that many of today’s timepieces are designed for and inspired by, and how those resulting watch designs fit into our day-to-day existence.
What we try to remember is that not everyone looks at a watch and immediately thinks of the technical specs and minor design elements like us watch lovers do. To appreciate watches as a whole, it is important to capture the wider breadth of why people are interested in them, and the activities and social implications of why certain models and designs are popular or existed in the first place. To do this, we combined not only imagery of aBlogtoWatch team members wearing and living with select Citizen watches, but also items that relate to that lifestyle or the watch itself in the display cased. Citizen did an excellent job of creating of an attractive and approachable space that we hope will be a unique element in the watch store retail environment.
For the project, the aBlogtoWatch team covered the Citizen Eco-Drive Satellite Wave F100 (review), the Citizen Promaster Aqualand Depth Meter (review), the Citizen Signature Grand Touring Sport (hands-on; review coming soon), the Citizen Eco-Drive Sailhawk (review coming soon), and the Citizen Eco-Drive Navihawk. The aBlogtoWatch display at the Citizen Watch Store in Times Square, New York City will be there from March 1st to April 30th, 2015. The Citizen store is located at 1500 Broadway. citizenwatch.com
