Press
REDKEN UNVEILS FIRST-EVER SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE FOR SALON HAIRCOLOR PROFESSIONALS
Tuesday, April 15 2008Chicago-based Interactive Agency Elevate Studios Creates Online Community for Shades EQ Haircolor Enthusiasts
NEW YORK and CHICAGO (April 15, 2008) - Redken, a leader in professional haircare, launched the first-ever online social networking community for salon professionals who use the company’s Shades EQ Equalizing Conditioning Color Gloss professional haircolor line. As part of the “Do You Shades EQ” campaign, which celebrates 20 years of amazing haircolor with Shades EQ, Redken launched an integrated communication campaign including editorial, advertising and a dedicated brand online social networking community - www.DoYouShadesEQ.com. Redken enlisted Chicago-based Elevate Studios to create the “Do You Shades EQ” social networking website. Elevate Studios’ responsibilities included online strategic and creative development as well as technical coding and website execution.
“We’re seeing the impact of reality shows, blogging and social networking influencing how brands can best reach and relate to their target audience online,” said Lawrence Bak, principal and executive creative director of Elevate Studios. “Today’s consumer wants an online community for their favorite brands in which they can be among and engage with other loyal brand users, so marketers are shifting from websites being purely informational to websites becoming much more interactive.”
Key site features include:
Design and Original Content
Recognizing that Redken stylists are very visual by nature, the company chose specific design elements to create compelling, original interactive content that would provide reasons to return to the site. The homepage navigation mimics the kind of note cards stylists typically use. As part of the original content, Redken included downloadable techniques and formulas using Shades EQ, video content including Behind the Scenes videos and interviews with featured artists and professionals as well as a video upload area for colorists to post their own Shades EQ “YouTube Style” videos showcasing their experience with Shades EQ. By uploading videos, colorists are entered to win a free four day/three night trip for two to New York City to participate in a photoshoot with their favorite Redken artist for an advertising campaign, which will be featured in the January 2009 issue of American Salon magazine.
Back-end Technology
The site provides the ability to display videos, provide a voting mechanism and the turnkey back-end technology for Redken stylists to upload their videos. To create these back-end components, the design team began with an open source “YouTube clone” software. This Hypertext Preprocessor or PHP-based software (an HTML-embedded scripting language) supported several of the site’s components, including video uploading with progress bar, encoding and playback; management of the videos once uploaded via an admin panel; an RSS feed and user ability to embed the video on social networking pages such as MySpace. However, implementing this required a specialized server configuration of a multitude of Linux applications, hundreds of dependencies and special configurations for Apache and PHP as well as an in-depth understanding of video encoding and compression methods.
Front-end Technology
After reviewing various means to deliver the videos and finding a voting tool - and knowing the popularity of YouTube - Redken decided to mirror the industry’s best practices so that its viewers can deliver and watch videos in a familiar format. Doing so required developing several front-end website elements from scratch. For example, a video voting feature was created and will be enabled at the end of the sweepstakes entry period through the admin panel. In building the video solution, the Elevate Studios design team included functionality elements such as tools to rate and comment on videos and the ability for entrants to create a unique profile including their photo. In order to reduce page loading, much of the front-end browser experience utilizes AJAX. Additionally, Elevate Studios built a number of custom plug-ins for jQuery (a light weight JavaScript library) which allowed the design team to incorporate interesting interactive elements such as slide-in boxes for logging in and when viewing a user’s profile by clicking on their name. The Behind-the-Scenes section of the site makes use of jQuery and AJAX. The entire front end was created with standards-compliant XHTML and utilizes CSS for layout.
Hardware
Given that encoding is both CPU and bandwidth intensive, Elevate Studios paid careful attention to identifying a hosting solution that adequately supports the site. Factoring in variables such as content delivery network (CDN), the design team chose a Rackspace dedicated server as the home for www.DoYouShadesEQ.com. Rackspace is a preferred host, recommend by Elevate Studios for their quality, stability and excellent support.
Shades EQ is one of the most frequently requested coloring products in salons - in fact, one of Redken’s top salons performed an average of 100 Shades EQ services every day in 2007. Demi-permanent haircolor falls between permanent and semi-permanent haircolor, and lasts between four to eight weeks, depending on how frequently the hair is washed. Redken Shades EQ is an award-winning demi-permanent haircolor and has won BehindTheChair.com’s Stylist Choice Award for the past seven years. Shades EQ delivers incredible color, shine and condition to hair with little or no lightening.
For more information about Shades EQ, please visit www.DoYouShadesEQ.com.
About Redken 5th Avenue NYC
Redken 5th Avenue NYC (a division of L’Oreal USA), is a leader in backstage beauty, editorial and technologically advanced salon products that meet the needs of both salon professionals and consumers. Working with industry greats like Guido Palau, one of the world’s most conceptual hairstylists, Redken is backstage at fashion shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris such as Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Prada, Versace, Balenciaga, and Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen. Redken’s team of talented session stylists work in film, television and print and have contributed to the trendsetting hairstyles of Natalie Portman, Hilary Swank, Uma Thurman and Chloe Sevigny. Get inspired, be part of it!
About Elevate Studios
Founded in 2003, Elevate Studios is a private, full-service, interactive marketing agency based in Chicago. Core agency expertise includes Web site design, online advertising, user interface design, application and interactive development, eCommerce front-end integration and media integration. Elevate Studios designs interactive campaigns for the standard-setting brands of Paramount Pictures, Sundance Channel, Redken, AirTran Airways and NAVIGON. For more information, please visit www.elevatestudios.com.