Company: Babesta, New York, NY USA
Company Description: Babesta is a children's retail store in New York City, curated for the cool city kid. It features handpicked fashions from across the globe, with an eye toward the unique, funky and fresh. Babesta also offers the best of design, gear and toys. With a keen eye to service, Babesta seeks to make gift giving and shopping as seamless as possible. There are 2 retail stores and an online boutique.
Nomination Category: Communications & Marketing Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Retail/Merchandising Marketing Campaign of the Year

Nomination Title: Babesta's Retail Marketing Campaign: Babesta Beat Mag / Mimi & the Magic Forest Story & Video

Tell the story of this nominated marketing campaign for the judges (up to 525 words). Describe the genesis, planning, execution, and results to date of your campaign. If applicable, remember to describe what's unique or innovative about your campaign:

Babesta, a children’s retail store in lower Manhattan and online, wanted to do something standout and create a strong brand message through a marketing initiative: Babesta Beat, a magazine-catalog created in-house featuring the Babesta lifestyle and products. As the magazine’s cornerstone, we decided to shoot the first (shop-able) fashionable children’s story (rather than children’s fashion story): Mimi & the Magic Forest.

As this was a marketing piece for a store, the story had to include, without seeming forced, a wide array of goods from strollers and furniture to toys and clothing. We wanted to make it magical, and showcase our fall/winter fashion and designs in an authentic way with a bit of Alice and Wonderland quirky charm. As we gathered the clothes from showrooms and laid them out, we grouped them by character and developed a persona behind each one, from Mimi and Magellan the Magician to Penelope Pinecone and Lena Leafwater. It was important to us that this story had the tenets of a good tale: it would trace the main character’s journey outside of her urban comfort zone as she embraces a new adventure. The idea was to demonstrate that Babesta (“curated for a cool city child”) embraced all kids, city and country, and in our instance “city” was more of a state of mind than a geographic location.

We amassed goods from the store and from our vendors and rented a U-Haul, and set off to the Berkshires.

We wrote the story, laid out the pages and then recorded an audio track of the story, while our videographer wove the video clips together a living, breathing version of the story that we would later post on youtube. The youtube version gives deeper insight and provides the audio story for kids to listen to and enjoy.

In addition to Mimi, we conceived of and wrote all of the other stories in the magazine, each underscoring our brand and lifestyle, including some favorites: 10 ways you know you’re a city kid, back-to-school playlist and profile of 10 year old DJ Fulano, Hot Wheels: How to Choose the Right Stroller and a Q&A with children’s fashion designer Cassandra Rhodin of Mini Rodini, as well as “ads” for the store describing store services. The writing, design and production was done in-house. As the magazine was printing, the internal team created an online version of Babesta Beat, with click throughs on every product and page so it was entirely shop-able.

We shipped this marketing piece/magazine, which reflects the Babesta brand and lifestyle, to 5000 of our clients, emailed it as part of our newsletter to our subscribers and promoted it on our home page and through our social media channels including Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube. We created a window that mimicked a scene from Mimi and extended the forest theme into the store. We were covered by publications including Tribeca Citizen, Cool Mom Picks and more. It was a huge undertaking for a very small team, but in this crowded and competitive environment, we wanted to take a chance and make a bold statement about our place in the market, value proposition and point of view.

Provide a brief biography of the leader of the team that planned and executed this marketing campaign (up to 125 words):

Jennifer Cattaui is the founder of Babesta and former magazine editor, most recently holding the position of Editor in Chief of Earnshaw’s magazine, and prior to that served as editor for fashion publications Zink, Stitch, Fashiontribes.com. She freelance writes for a host of publications and her work has been published in Earnshaw’s, Babble, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales, In New York and more. Prior to work in retail and media, Cattaui was a tax law consultant at Ernst & Young. She graduated Tufts University (BA 1994), earned her JD with tax honors at Rutgers University (JD 1997) and earned her certificate at the Columbia Management Institute Program (CMI) at Columbia University (2012).