British Airways new uniform and colleague engagement

British Airways - New Uniform

British Airways new uniform and colleague engagement

Bond creative agency was invited to work with British Airways to support the internal communications of the project to take colleagues on a change journey that ended within the uniform reveal. It was essential to the client that BA colleagues were involved in the design process of their new uniform, so Bond developed a mobile application to survey staff on any requirements they might have. After seeing engagement across 35,000 colleagues, the app formed into a communication platform to share feedback between us and the client. The final phase was to develop the reveal application – the main purpose of the app – to provide colleagues with a tool to discover and navigate their uniform, what looks they could wear and how.

More Info

client:

British Airways

contributions:

Experience Design

Tech Consultancy

UX/UI Design

Web

Content Creation

Data Analytics

Photographer: Kulbir Thandi

industry:

Airline

700 images, 91 products, 41 looks, 10 wardrobes

A challenge for the reveal application was to seamlessly display all attire options. British Airways’s full uniform options consist of nearly 100 individual products. Each item needed to be photographed while modeled by colleagues, as flat lays and videographed in order to show a complete set of looks and how the uniform items are designed to work together. These then fit into 10 wardrobe choices depending on the job role, with both male and female options. It was natural for the app design to follow the elegant feel and uniform design ethic created by Ozwald Boateng to provide a user experience fitting of a high‑end retail store, rather than a corporate application.

Content is King

With our British Airways colleagues always driving the creative process, it was a natural fit to focus our cameras on members of the BA staff rather than professional actors. Some were quite new to the photoshoot process, so we focused on fostering a relaxing environment to deliver authentic images that showed the BA uniform in its full potential. Each wardrobe look led with a hero video of a staff member wearing the uniform, complimented with images of each item within the full-look, as well the accessory items that could be ordered. Teaser videos of the uniform were created prior to launch, honing in on the craftsmanship of the patterns and the quality of the materials. These snippets underscored the overall creative vision by guiding the eye towards the unique design of the uniform – like the BA speedmarque that is woven directly into the fabric. An experience created for the BA team by the BA team.

“From briefing to execution, you have been a dream to work with.”

Peter Lyons

Senior Communications Manager

All about the tech

A key thing was that the technology had to be secure, quick, and easy to use. In order to support all of BA’s staff, no matter where they are in the world, a web-based experience was decided as the best option to create an optimal user interface and experience. This was coded using Gatsby that allowed for an extremely fast user experience, whilst being as adaptable as possible. From a backend perspective, we utilized the Hygraph CMS to provide a flexible approach that allows the content to be modeled and managed in a way that is easily understood and matches the front end. The digital experience and technology enabling it was built to scale. Within 72 hours of launch the site had received over 1 million hits on the platform, with over 100gb of data delivered to users over that period. The analytics provided by the solution then enabled British Airways to understand the usage: where users accessed the content, what uniform was most viewed and how long was spent viewing the content.