Activating at Paris Couture Week is bold for a brand that retails between $20-$2,000, Farmer acknowledges. “It obviously [was] quite brave,” she says, “but we wanted to show up in a fresh and fun way. We hosted an evening of dancing and activities, and the press were saying it was a breath of fresh air.” Wonders is currently only rolled out in the UK, the US, Germany, France, Italy and Australia, and available for six months ending February. But Pandora may expand the platform in the future, she adds.
As a global brand, it can be challenging to understand where best to focus different projects and campaigns. “Balancing the global with the local is a challenge for most big brands,” Farmer says. “You can’t be culturally relevant if you’re not locally relevant, but at the same time, you have one brand that you want to present, one DNA, one story. So it’s about trying to find that balance to say, here are the tentpole moments, here’s the story that we want to tell, but then giving the markets enough freedom to say, ‘This is how we want to amplify this.’ It’s about amplifying the stories that we’re creating globally, not creating things from scratch.”
A few months ago, Farmer visited Japan, a fast-growing market for Pandora, to see Summer Stories, an immersive pop-up in the heart of Shibuya, Tokyo. The pop-up featured new products, a gelato stand, and a photobooth, with over 200 media, influencers and celebrity guests attending the opening. “Japan was really small, but we started investing in the market a few years ago, working with press, with influencers, and now the brand is really hot there,” she explains. “On a [random] Wednesday afternoon, there are queues down the street, so it’s really exciting. I think the storytelling of Pandora and this idea that it’s collectible and can speak to your identity really resonates with the Japanese consumer. We’re going to open a new flagship in Kyoto next year.”
In September, the brand will launch a brand-new platform called Voices. Where Wonders is about craft and is designed by the brand’s in-house designers, tapping a creative collaborator like Lambert to bring it to life, Voice will be a full product collaboration, working with a creative talent to design the creative,” Farmer says. “There’s so much more [in the pipeline], but I’m very excited about that.”
