Company

DFS has spent more than 50 years building one of the most recognisable names in furniture in the UK, and today runs over 120 stores nationwide. Since 2016, DFS has been the Official Homeware Partner of Team GB.

That partnership means sofas in the Team GB Village at Summer and Winter Games alike, giving athletes a proper place to put their feet up between competing.

For Tokyo 2020, DFS built on that partnership with an ambitious, multi-faceted campaign. This involved a new fabric blending British and Japanese styles as part of a limited edition range, athlete ambassadors getting living room makeovers, as well as the public being invited to go head-to-head with the nation’s athletes in a series of Armchair Athlete games. DFS even ran a live chat show from a Tokyo studio, where they caught up with Team GB athletes once they had competed. Between the product range, the athlete features, the games and live shows, the sponsorship was generating a huge volume of content across multiple formats and platforms.

Challenge

All of that content was social-first, but it lived across a patchwork of channels with no central hub. Customers had no easy way to catch everything DFS and Team GB were creating together, so parts of the campaign risked going unnoticed, and audiences never got the chance to engage further. It also meant DFS had no consolidated way to measure the campaigns, no clear picture of what content people were actually engaging with, or what that engagement was worth to the sponsorship.

We needed somewhere to house and showcase all of this content. Somewhere you could experience everything going on in one place and see content you might have missed, without necessarily having to go to different platforms to view it.

Emma Liasides

PR Manager at DFS

Solution

DFS partnered with Amondo to bring every strand of this co-branded, sponsor-led Team GB campaign into one place, rather than let it live and disappear across separate social feeds.

One hub for the whole campaign

An Amondo Gallery, integrated into a dedicated Team GB Hub on the DFS website, brought together posts from Team GB, athlete ambassadors, brand influencers and DFS itself, alongside content from DFS customers showing off their own product purchases and reviews. Audiences could explore the campaign at their own pace, while DFS collected real insight on dwell time, clicks and engagement behind the scenes.

The Gallery brings everything together in a way that feels very natural, but that really showcases the breadth of content that was created around the campaign for consumers to interact with and enjoy.

Emma Liasides

PR Manager at DFS

Bringing the Games into people’s living rooms

A dedicated Gallery was also built around the Armchair Athlete games, pulling together content from Team GB athletes alongside submissions from members of the public competing against them. DFS briefed in the key terms and hashtags to look out for, and Amondo’s team tracked, collected and organised everything matching that brief in real time, keeping the Gallery constantly refreshed with the best content from members of the public, so every submission made on social media was captured and included.

The managed curation service was the single best aspect. We set up the search brief, joined a WhatsApp group, and from there it's all taken care of.

Emma Liasides

PR Manager at DFS

Turning content into product discovery

Amondo’s Click-Through Tiles connected content directly to high-converting call-to-actions, sending audiences through to explore the Team GB Yuttari range, find out how to become an Armchair Athlete, or to tune into the live chat show.

The Click-Through Tiles meant DFS’s content wasn’t just sitting on the site waiting to be noticed. Every tile turned a piece of content into a route toward the high-converting parts of the site, pulling people further into the DFS brand world and toward the actions that actually mattered commercially. All that time and money invested in content was finally being put to work, rather than sitting there idle and unused.

Extending reach through a media partnership

DFS also embedded a Gallery on a Mail Online microsite, surfacing highlights from its core feeds on a major media partner’s site. The pull for Mail Online was the same thing that made the whole campaign work: real fans and everyday people interacting directly with Team GB athletes, genuinely part of the Olympic moment rather than watching it from a distance. That kind of user generated content is what media outlets want to share, and it extended the campaign’s reach well beyond DFS’s own channels.

Results

Bringing brand, influencer and audience-generated content into one unified experience gave DFS a genuine emotional connection point with fans during a key campaign period, simplified how people found campaign content, and kept people on the DFS website for longer.

• 60,000+ impressions across the campaign’s Galleries

• 55-second average session length

• 5.1% click-through rate to product pages from the Armchair Athlete Gallery

We found that when people reach the content, they stay; the dwell times are great. The format performs really well, and for an ecommerce site, this is well worth knowing.

Emma Liasides

PR Manager at DFS