“Best of the Best” 2023
Our real estate client’s luxury division, Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, consists of 15,000 of the company’s top agents who sell homes with price tags that reach tens of millions. Noting the growing content trend of year-end gift guides with affiliate links, we came up with a unique way to market to high-net-worth homeowners and underline CBGL agents’ upscale expertise — a bespoke digital shopping guide featuring the best luxury home goods. The effort received a write-up in Fast Company and was a winner with the target market and the client’s leadership.
Art Direction: Carly Sorensen
Site Development
We developed a standalone site to host the concept, styling it to befit a luxury publication. We created assets and guidelines for this “Best of the Best” sub-brand, including logos, badges, and typography. We organized the UX around trends and products within six key home-related categories/pages: Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, Bathroom, Outdoor, and Technology.
Selecting the Best Products
Unlike sites like Wirecutter, Refinery29, and the Cut, our client’s legal department required us to obtain explicit approval from any company whose product we featured in our guide. So my partner Carly Sorensen and I set out to form affiliate relationships with 1st Dibs, Williams Sonoma, CB2, Arhaus, Flamingo Estate, and dozens of others. Guided by our taste and the agent survey, we curated hundreds of products to feature. Carly art directed them in a unified style and I wrote a huge amount of product description copy.
Highlighting Luxury Agents
For a handful of Coldwell Banker Global Luxury’s top-performing agents, we designed a sleek opportunity to display their knowledge and personality to site visitors. We helped these experts select some personal-favorite luxury products and featured their unique insights.
Social Promotion
We developed a suite of stylish social ads and assets that promoted the guide, educating and hyping the audience on this first-of-its-kind effort from a real estate company. We also provided these for use by CBGL’s 15,000 luxury agents, so the larger campaign could benefit from their individual organic social traffic.
Project Management
Bringing the Best of the Best guide to life was a massive effort of design, development, and writing achieved by a lean team in less than two months. From creating the branded look and feel, to acquiring brand partners and selecting dozens of products, to populating and fine-tuning the web experience, to client and legal reviews, the project demanded extreme amounts organizational rigor and flow.
Behind the Scenes
I created and managed countless spreadsheets, folders, and decks to keep diligent track of prospective and approved products, affiliate links, prices, photo credit requirements, as well as assets for developers, the client, luxury agents, and the PR team.