How Pen Store Generated 4500+ UGC Posts from Their Community

Meet our customer Pen Store—the powerhouse of creativity! They’re a stationery brand founded in Sweden back in 2010. Pen Store started as an ecommerce store but also wanted to offer their creative community a place where everyone could enjoy a unique mix of pencils and artist materials in person, so they opened a brick-and-mortar store in Stockholm.

Recently, Pen Store launched a competition that brought them many smiles, happy customers, and over 4500 new pieces of UGC. Let’s explore the story behind the Pen Store and learn more about their fruitful contest!

Why you’ll love Pen Store

The team behind Pen Store is aesthetically driven, just like their customers. They always ensure all their products look neat and offer the highest precision, providing their customers with anything they need for creating, no matter the shape or form. 

After all, Pen Store’s slogan is “Tools for Creativity.” 

To this day, Pen Store is one of Scandinavia’s leading players in pencils and artist materials. Over the years, they’ve expanded beyond the Scandinavian market and offer deliveries throughout the EU. In fact, Pen Store was one of the first ecommerce players in the art supplies field in Scandinavia. The idea was just as good as it was simple; to offer a broad but selected mix of tools for creativity. Always at good prices, with a strong customer focus and fast deliveries. 

Without a doubt, this idea went down well with the crowd.

Engaging a community of creatives with a contest

This Spring, Pen Store launched a competition called Pen Store Talents 2023. 

Pen Store sent each participant a mix of 8 different pens and pencils. Each competitor’s task was to create an artwork using all and only the products in the entry kit. The surface material could be paper or anything else; it’s up to each creative to decide.

When participants are done creating, they upload their art on Pen Store’s website through a Cevoid upload form, and a dedicated jury assesses their work.

The winner received an amazing prize of art supplies worth €4500 for their creative endeavours, and 9 runners-up were awarded €95 to spend on goodies at Pen Store.

The competition was marketed through digital channels as well as by using billboards in the Stockholm subway.

Pen Store sent each participant a mix of 8 different pens and pencils. Each competitor’s task was to create an artwork using all and only the products in the entry kit. The surface material could be paper or anything else; it’s up to each creative to decide.

When participants are done creating, they upload their art on Pen Store’s website through a Cevoid upload form, and a dedicated jury assesses their work.

The winner received an amazing prize of art supplies worth €4500 for their creative endeavours, and 9 runners-up were awarded €95 to spend on goodies at Pen Store.

The competition was marketed through digital channels as well as by using billboards in the Stockholm subway.

In total, 10 000 kits were available, and to Pen Store’s surprise, they sold out in a few days. “We had to stop all digital marketing activities after only 3.5 days. We estimated to have them up and running for 30 days, but this was a happy miscalculation,” says Madeleine Stern, Head of Marketing at Pen Store.

In total, Pen Store received a stunning amount of over 4500 art submissions! And the competition was welcomed with open arms as the Pen Store’s Instagram page was flooded with positive feedback.

Moreover, 900+ creators (some of them have up to 40K followers!) shared their art pieces on Instagram with the hashtag #PenStoreTalent2023, increasing Pen Store’s reach and spreading the word about the competition.

According to Madeleine, the entire campaign was infused with a great deal of enthusiasm and positive energy. In social channels, participants celebrated each other’s work and showered their fellow competitors with wonderful compliments.

Picture a remarkable gathering of 4500 artists from every corner of the globe, each wielding the same humble pens. With boundless imagination, every artist brought forth their own ideas and conjured pure magic onto paper. It shows the transformative power of passionate souls armed with pens and an insatiable hunger to create.

Madeleine also adds that the Pen Store team is proud of their achievements and is glad the competition was a roaring success. The Pen Store Talents 2023 was so impactful that after the contest ended, a couple of teachers from Swedish schools contacted Pen Store asking if they could do a similar thing for their school.

To competitions and beyond with Cevoid

To successfully launch the competition, Pen Store used a Cevoid upload form to collect content. The upload form was placed on their website, where all applicants could share their creative wonders.

One of the biggest challenges for Pen Store was finding a way to manage the massive amount of submissions.

Digital art galleries for showcasing submissions 

If you check out Pen Store’s digital art gallery, you’ll get all 4500+ contest submissions right at your fingertips. This amount of participation and dedication from Pen Store’s brand community is impressive, and the compilation of all art pieces creates a loving, engaging community feeling. 

A digital art gallery is a beautiful and inclusive way to showcase UGC, so every participant can see their contributions to the art contest. Once you scroll through the digital art gallery, you’ll notice that every consecutive gallery auto-loads, providing a smooth browsing experience. 

Plus, when you click on any art piece, you can see the talented artist’s name and give the artwork appreciation through an applause button.

Getting the most out of UGC on the daily

Alongside gathering content for competitions, Pen Store also uses Cevoid to collect and showcase their customers’ beautiful creations. From beautiful digital galleries to product pages, they’ve got multiple aspects of their website covered with UGC, ready to inspire customers and curious visitors.

UGC and in-house videos on product pages

Displaying a mix of UGC and in-house content can work wonders for product pages, and Pen Store knows it. They efficiently showcase content collected from their artsy community along with their own product videos. Let’s explore what it looks like and how Pen Store makes these two content types work in their favor! 

Adding a UGC gallery on product pages

One of the most popular UGC showcasing approaches is through product pages. By creating a dedicated gallery featuring their goodies, Pen Store provides interactive social proof while creating a sense of community around their products.

Displaying in-house videos through Cevoid cards on product pages

Pen Store adds a touch of excitement to their product pages with product overview videos they’ve made themselves. By using the Cards tool, Pen Store was able to provide a unique take on their products. 

Plus, this approach adds an extra layer of reliability since customers can see the product from different angles, its size, and how it fits into a hand.

What you can learn from Pen Store Talents

One of the best ways to bring a community together is by giving them something to do and something to look forward to. By simply offering kits of 8 art tools to their community, Pen Store was able to generate over 4500 UGC pieces that they’ll be able to use as social proof, to boost their engagement, or use in their future marketing campaigns. 

The community engagement and feedback from participants were heart-warming, as customers wrote an abundance of lovely comments on Pen Store’s Instagram, supporting participating artists. 

Grow and engage your brand community with Cevoid

We're always happy to see our beloved customers grow their businesses and attract like-minded individuals into their brand communities. If you're looking for an easy-to-use adaptive solution for collecting and showcasing UGC and other visual content, give Cevoid a go.

In our hands, you'll also be able to effectively manage and engage with your brand community as it grows; plus, you’ll get access to a round-the-clock team at Cevoid that's always ready to help you no matter what. 💜