La Maison du Canevas partners with Flowbox to manage the content created by its online community and create a more interactive shopping experience

La Maison du Canevas et de la Broderie, a mail-order company for creative hobbies and needlework, has partnered with Flowbox – Europe’s leading User Generated Content platform. Read on to discover the ways in which UGC allows the company to connect artistic communities together and tap into the rich social media culture surrounding their niche.

La Maison du Canevas is Europe’s largest seller of canvases, embroidery, sewing, and haberdashery materials – boasting an extensive range of around 35,000 different product references in stock.

The company began its journey more than 40 years ago and sprang from humble market stall beginnings. These days, the canevas.com website functions as a digital catalog, allowing customers to choose from an abundance of different international creative leisure brands, all gathered at the heart of La Maison du Canevas. 

A creative spirit lies at the heart of their brand, and customers are encouraged to develop their creative spirit through activities and hobbies such as paint by numbers, sewing, embroidery, diamond embroidery and knitting.

With a growing amount of social media activity around their niche, especially in markets like Eastern Europe, Maison du Canevas knew it was time to start truly utilizing the content that consumers were sharing on Facebook and Instagram.  

“With a growing level of activity on Instagram and influencers who came to us with ideas for competitions or challenges that we could sponsor, we understood that it was absolutely necessary to use the content present on social networks and to put it on our site”. 

Isabelle Tissot, Head of Web Marketing at La Maison du Canevas

Social media is especially important to the companies’ niche in the market because consumers can easily share their finished creative projects. Seeing the final product offers inspiration to potential customers on what they can do with the materials they buy.

“We wanted to use Flowbox because we sell kit products. So we don’t necessarily have photos of the products ready-made. Visitors need to project themselves onto the products and visualize the projects in a particular setting. The brands we sell on our site increasingly understand this.”

Isabelle Tissot, Head of Web Marketing at La Maison du Canevas

Social media images of this nature also bring the more static products or kits to life, making them more engaging and desirable. A simple embroidery kit can become a piece of art that has been lovingly poured over in someone’s living room, for example.

In the companies’ UGC you can see finished embroidery pieces with a glimpse into somebody’s imagination. Seeing someone’s real life in the background for instance makes the content easier to relate to than a set of materials alone, this is illustrated by the example included below.

They realized that the images of finished creative efforts in real-life contexts that exist online can also be used to further draw together a close-knit community of social media users, especially in regions of Europe where activities like embroidery are popular.

Upon further research, they determined that our User Generated Content platform was one of the most comprehensive tools on the market for compiling and using consumer content.

Since then, their collaboration with Flowbox has been smooth sailing. The features available provide them with the user-friendly toolkit that they need to run an effective User Generated Content strategy.

 “So we started using Flowbox everywhere on the eCommerce site: on the homepage, in a lookbook, and on all the product pages. We found that the platform itself is very easy to use. It is easy to handle. It is also very simple to connect the products to the photos.” 

Isabelle Tissot, Head of Web Marketing at La Maison du Canevas

Flowbox’s solutions fit well with the daily technical demands of their eCommerce operation. It’s worth mentioning that La Maison du Canevas’ experience with Flowbox’s product module is one that exemplifies the simplicity of our integration process.

 “The integration went very well overall. The integration of the product catalog was also very easy. I think that in comparison to other product modules on the market, yours is the simplest to use. When products are not up to date for X or Y reasons, we just press a button and it gets updated. Even with Google, it’s not that simple”.

Isabelle Tissot, Head of Web Marketing at La Maison du Canevas

The collaboration between Flowbox and La Maison du Canevas has been strong throughout. The power of our collaboration is exemplified by the quality of their content-based, community-driven campaigns.

La Maison du Canevas recently sponsored the ‘Plan Renard’ campaign, a challenge launched by influencers that encouraged consumers to embroider a little fox framed in different positions. Images of the embroidered fox were shared by social media users from 18 different countries. These images were then used to make a magnificent stop motion video of an adorable dancing fox.

Campaigns like this show us what the power of community can do – it pays to be creative and Flowbox is a tool for fostering that creativity.

“The fact that we are able to create a dedicated campaign page on our site, and to be able to put the participant’s photos there, means that Flowbox makes it possible for users to really get involved. We fully integrate our community into our website – it is part of the business. This type of campaign becomes truly collaborative thanks to Flowbox, and they direct our community right to our site where all of our products are.”

Isabelle Tissot, Head of Web Marketing at La Maison du Canevas