How we launched Britain’s first new Department Store in a century with MeetEdgar

A store of firsts

In 2025, Lovebrook & Green made retail history. Not only did it become the first new British department store to open in over a century, it was also the first ever to launch in the era of social media - and the world’s first digital-first department store built around ethics, sustainability and long-term emotional value.

This presented both a rare opportunity and a significant challenge: how do you reinvent one of the most beloved retail institutions of the 20th century for the technologies, expectations, and psychology of the 21st?

There were no marble foyers. No scent-drenched fragrance halls. No champagne bars to seduce the senses.

Just 3,000 organic followers - and a high-end, quiet luxury brand identity, tone of voice, and visual world crafted entirely by behavioural agency 181st Street Communications.

Our brief was to build emotional salience, trust, and loyalty from a standing start - with the composure of a heritage luxury brand, not the tactics of a scrappy startup.

And from day one, we understood something crucial:

The only way to grow fast…was to go slow.

The underserved audience with untapped power

Lovebrook & Green’s core audience - thoughtful, well educated, wealthy women over 55 - value elegance, provenance and emotional depth. They don’t want ‘drop culture’. They want brands that reflect who they already are: composed, discerning, wise. 

This is the cohort who hold the majority of private wealth in the UK. They’re digitally fluent, aesthetically literate, and fed up with being either ignored or infantilised by mainstream ecommerce.

Most brands, especially in DTC, are built for younger people in an identity experimentation phase - trying on who they might become. But women 55+ are often in a phase of identity confirmation. They don’t want brands that reshape them. They want brands that recognise them.

And therein lay the opportunity to build a new kind of heritage brand: one that wouldn’t merely optimise for conversions, but honour the long, trust-rich customer journeys that department stores were once famed for. These institutions didn’t thrive because of urgency. They thrived because of reliability, aesthetic coherence, and generational loyalty.

We didn’t want to mimic that legacy. We wanted to rebuild it for a digital world.

Don’t optimise for urgency. Optimise for meaning.

The typical ecommerce launch is engineered around what behavioural economists refer to as System 1 thinking - the fast, automatic, emotionally impulsive mode of decision-making. Think countdown timers, FOMO drops, "Only 3 left!" urgency prompts.

System 1 tactics are highly effective for low-cost, low-stakes products, but for high-consideration purchases, especially among luxury audiences, they feel manipulative and disposable.

So instead of hacking the dopamine loop, we designed for System 2: the slower, more reflective mental process where meaning is made, and memory is formed. Brands that live in System 2 are the ones people trust, remember, and return to.

That principle shaped everything.

181st Street Communications built a 30-day pre-launch campaign around one quiet conviction:

Don’t demand attention. Deserve it.

Using MeetEdgar, we scheduled one post per day, every day, at the same time - not to trigger urgency, but to create rhythm. A ritual.

Each post was crafted to prime a mindset. There were no features, benefits or price points. Instead, we shared micro-essays and poetic copy inspired by craft, slowness, stewardship, and aesthetic living - preparing the emotional ground for what the store would one day offer.

This wasn’t content marketing. This was emotional conditioning.

We introduced the feeling of the store long before we revealed its digital shelves. 

In traditional department stores, brand memory is built through tactile experience - the scent in the beauty hall, the lighting on the linens, the sound of shoes on polished stone. But online, you don’t have those sensory cues.

So we had to create an emotional equivalent.

What scent and sound once achieved in-store, tone and timing had to conjure digitally.

When you’re launching a luxury brand - particularly one aimed at thoughtful, high-trust audiences - you don’t win by pushing. You win by resonating.

From behavioural theory to daily habit

This campaign was deeply informed by behavioural science.

We drew on anticipation bias (Loewenstein, 1987), which shows that the act of waiting increases the value we assign to what we’re waiting for. Savouring is part of the experience. By pacing the campaign like a slow bloom, we increased both desire and emotional investment.

We employed costly signalling theory (Spence, 1973), the principle that certain cues signal quality precisely because they are expensive - not in money, but in effort, restraint and risk. A brand that launches with no urgency, no product reveal, and no offers is implicitly saying: We can afford to wait. And so can you. That is the language of luxury.

We rejected the dopamine-chasing tactics of digital commerce and chose depth over clicks, memory over manipulation.

And behind the scenes, MeetEdgar gave us the operational backbone to sustain the pace and keep the tone unwavering - ensuring every post, every day, felt like part of a coherent unfolding.

The Private View: A department store unfolded

After 30 days, we didn’t launch.

We invited.

We opened the store one department at a time, releasing new spaces - fashion, beauty, home - week by week in a private preview. Still no buying. Just browsing. Just belonging.

Each new section came with its own story: about a maker, a material, a place. In doing so, we triggered a powerful behavioural effect known as the IKEA Effect - the phenomenon where people value things more when they feel they’ve participated in them. Our audience had walked with us through the pre-launch. By the time the store opened, they were no longer passive visitors. They felt like co-creators of the brand.

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Designed for legacy, not just launch

Every pre-launch post was a one-off - but none of it was throwaway. Each was crafted to live on in the brand’s evergreen content library, to be managed in MeetEdgar, forming the foundation of the brand’s tone, storytelling and seasonal rhythm.

The same tool that powered our pre-launch cadence will be used to scale the brand’s voice with consistency and care - allowing tone to become a strategic asset, not a creative afterthought.

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The results

No ads. No countdowns. No discounts.

Instagram engagement reached over 1,000% above luxury retail benchmarks.

Email performance exceeded sector averages by 60%.

The average engagement rate across the website during the Private View hit 93.5%, with users not only staying but exploring - spending over 2.5 minutes on site on average, despite no ability to purchase.

Customers described the brand using words like "so romantic", "beautiful", "a lovely sentiment", and "philosophical". Words rarely, if ever, associated with ecommerce. But exactly what we were aiming for.

This wasn’t conversion-first design. This was emotion-first design.

And it worked.