Vitsœ runs a print campaign written entirely by its own customers

The Brand Identity: A Vitsœ print ad contains no shelves. There is no studio photograph, no product cutout, no rendering of the 606 Universal Shelving System that has been the company’s foundation since 1960. Instead, readers encounter a verbatim email from a customer to a Vitsœ planner – a message about a retired carpenter father marvelling at the assembly, or a 15-year wait before a first purchase, or shelves moved through several homes as a family grew.

Launched in November 2024 and ongoing, the campaign shares a new story from a Vitsœ customer – never repeated within the same publication. The decision is rooted in something Vitsœ has long understood about how the company grows. “Word of mouth and customer recommendations already do some of the most important work for us, so the campaign is simply a way of making that visible in print,” explains Priyesh Desai, Graphic Designer. The emails arrive daily into the planners’ inboxes, an abundance that has become its own challenge.

With supply ongoing, the work lies in choosing carefully rather than scraping for material. Customer language is reproduced more or less untouched. Vitsœ removes personal details, fixes the occasional typo, and sends a PDF to the writer for approval before anything reaches print, but tone and content remain intact. “The slight idiosyncrasies are exactly what make each email feel human,” Desai notes. The restraint is consistent with how Vitsœ describes its shelving: a blank canvas on which to paint your colourful life.

Letting customers write the ads is the same idea applied to advertising. Media placement does much of the quiet intelligence in the campaign. An email mentioning a growing library or shelves carried from one home to another finds its way into the Financial Times Life & Arts Books pages or the London Review of Books, where readers are already living among physical books. Feedback about records, amplifiers and the pleasures of finally having space for music equipment is placed in The Wire. The match is never accidental.

Geographical relevance plays a part too, with local feedback chosen for local readerships and stories from further afield deployed to show the reach of a service that ships to over 90 countries from its production base in Royal Leamington Spa. Word count shapes the placement as much as the subject. Some longer emails belong in particular publications because of the column space available, and where two ads run at similar lengths, Vitsœ might simply invert the colours – white on black to black on white – to signal that each appearance is a fresh message.

The editorial context of each title acts, in Desai’s words, as “a gentle frame, helping the right story find the right reader.” A QR code in the corner of each ad has produced data that quietly affirms the approach. Scans have come in from more than 50 countries, including Chile, South Africa, Uzbekistan and India – places far from Vitsœ’s typical markets. “The geography changes, but the human situations do not,” Desai says.

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This article highlights a unique customer-driven advertising strategy that could significantly influence brand engagement practices, making it highly relevant and innovative for brand strategy professionals.