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As a company committed to helping the community and having been recently named as one of Ireland’s best workplaces for women, Tesco wanted to do something meaningful on International Women’s Day for their female colleagues and customers. Specifically, they wanted to inspire women, rather than just celebrating them as most brands do. We formed a partnership with the Women’s Museum of Ireland to do just that.

The Women’s Museum of Ireland is dedicated to archiving and celebrating the incredible achievements of Irish women from days gone by, but it only lives online and doesn’t have a brick and mortar home. For International Women’s Day, we partnered with them to turn a museum without a home into the biggest museum in the world, and thus inspire Irish women across the country.

On International Women’s Day, every Tesco store in the country became a branch of the Women’s Museum of Ireland and featured exhibitions on 6 incredible Irish women – all curated by Tesco employees and told along the store’s shelves through custom shelf-talkers. Visitors were guided by in-store leaflets and could follow along to the stories through audio guides recorded by well-known voices from TV and the stage. The audio guides were accessible through a custom-built website that could be found through the URL or QR code featured on all of our in-store materials. For one special day, the Women’s Museum of Ireland had 152 branches across the nation and a total floor space of 3,167,825 sq. ft – making it bigger than any other museum in the world.

One of our biggest challenges was to create a consistent look and feel as the women whose stories we were telling varied in age, with some living long before photos existed. To accomplish a consistent style, we worked with illustrator Leib Chigrin. His brief was to create timeless illustrations of the few photos or paintings we could find of our selected women. These illustrations lived both on museum content in stores, online, and in our press – which both announced and invited the nation to visit.

Though the partnership with the Women’s Museum of Ireland was not announced until the launch day, visitors flocked to their local branches across the country. All in all, 463,429 shoppers visited the museum, which amounted to an astonishing 11% increase in Tesco footfall. And though our main goal was to inspire the women of Ireland, an incremental sales uplift of over €2.7 million in a single day wasn’t exactly an unwelcome result.