THE ZARA PHENOMENON
How We Turned a Business Book into a Pop Culture Staple
Client
Eksmo Non-Fiction, #1 publishing house in CIS-countries (2015).
problem
Launch the Top Business Awards book series and make people talk about it (beyond the traditional business audience).
IDEA
Publishing was booming, but business books were competing for attention with teen novels and interactive titles like Wreck This Journal.
Instead of fighting on the same shelf, we looked at an emerging social platform at the time: Instagram.
The human insight was simple: people love to show off objects that signal taste, status, and cultural relevance. So we stopped thinking of the book as a book and started treating it as a product.
That’s how the idea was born: to turn the book itself into an iconic ZARA shopping bag.
EXECUTION:
We localised Covadonga O’Shea’s The Man from Zara for Slavic markets (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) and transformed it from a business book into a pop culture staple.
The book was designed to physically resemble a ZARA shopping bag, complete with attached handles. The packaging became the core of the launch strategy, supported by a high-quality translation and a localised title.
The project became a bestseller, selling over 500,000 copies with continuous reprints. Due to the handcrafted packaging, each copy required manual assembly and careful logistics coordination, and I was in charge of it.
My role: Creative Producer, Junior Editor.
MEDIA: AdIndex, industry and marketing publications, dozens of reviews on book marketplaces (ireccommend, labirint, ozon) numerous Instagram and YouTube reviews. From bloggers to casual readers, everyone wanted to get The Phenomenon of ZARA.
