Events & Experiences
With an increasingly challenging retail climate, our task for Christmas 2019 at The Harvey Centre, Harlow was to stem the fall in footfall, position centre’s food and leisure area ‘The Terrace’ as the place to be this festive season, increase social media engagement and encourage a longer term positive view of the centre.
Each weekend in the month leading up to Christmas, we enlisted the help of local, small businesses to host a ‘Crafty Christmas’. Sellers were given space to showcase a fabulous array of unique and special hand-crafted gifts, decorations and more while a face painter entertained the little ones. Retailers got involved, with mulled wine and live music on offer for shoppers to enjoy, while the centre’s fun, creative, Christmas craft workshops – in partnership with a retailer, proved really popular with children.
A traditional town crier also called out season’s greetings every weekend and helped to spread the festive cheer throughout The Harvey Centre!
Another angle we explored was a partnership with a local blogger who appeared the perfect fit for our audience.
The Terrace celebrated an unprecedented increase in footfall over the launch weekend with an amazing +34.1% on the Saturday and +36% on the Sunday YOY. The following weekends also achieved a significant increase in footfall YOY of +6.3% (Sat and Sun week 2), +3.1% (Sat week 3), +2.6% (Sun week 3), +16.5% (week 4) and +13.1% (Sun week 4).
Our blogger partnership inspired a number of positive comments and her Instagram post about our event attracted 120 likes and 39 comments!
