The Store Oxford
One of the most anticipated hotel launches of 2024, in Oxford’s converted Boswell’s department store, with rooms, a spa, food and beverage and a rooftop terrace all opening at once.
The context
The Store occupies the old Boswell’s building in the centre of Oxford — a landmark most of the city has a memory of. We were brought in during the build phase, as part of the launch team, to design, develop and launch the website that would carry the opening.
A new opening is the one moment where nothing has to be retrofitted. It is also the moment with the least room for error: there is no historic performance to lean on and no audience already in the funnel.
What was disconnected
Nothing yet — which was the opportunity. The risk on a launch of this kind is that the website, the advertising and the content get briefed separately and only meet at go-live, by which point the guest journey is whatever the three of them happen to add up to.
A further complication: branding and parts of the UX sat with an existing design partner. The work had to hold their vision intact while making it perform.
What we changed
We built the site in step with the branding partner rather than after them, so the luxury of the concept survived contact with a booking journey. Four revenue streams — rooms, spa, food and beverage, and the rooftop terrace — each needed their own path through the site without fragmenting it into four sites.
The advertising went live as a full-funnel programme from day one, across Google Ads, paid social and metasearch, targeting the whole journey rather than just the people already searching the hotel’s name.
Which disciplines were involved
Experience and Studios on the site and its content. Growth on the launch campaigns. Advisory has since become part of the relationship: we now contribute to the wider marketing strategy and the technical decisions behind it.
What improved
The Store opened with a platform that showed the property properly and a campaign that could find an audience for a hotel nobody had stayed in yet — across every level of the funnel, not just the branded terms.
What the work taught
Our team stayed at the hotel. It changed how we marketed it. There is a limit to how well anyone can sell an experience they have only seen in a photograph, and for a launch that gap is the whole risk.
