Daslu Cover Girls

Who wouldn't like being recognized by their favorite retailer? To celebrate its 50th anniversary this spring and show its appreciation, Daslu, São Paulo's top luxury department store, cast each of its 375 most loyal clients on individual covers of the quarterly Daslu magazine.

The usual mailings of special offers and glossy catalogs help stores to cultivate relationships—and sales—but Daslu truly has a familial relationship with its customers, one that's unusual for a store of its size. Owner Eliana Tranchesi knows the long list of her top clients by name, and Brazil's well-heeled daughters often work in the store before getting married or moving on to other careers.

When we visited the store last week, we spoke to Patricia Ramalho, Daslu magazine's creative director, who said that the cover-model initiative was Tranchesi's brainchild as a way of thanking shoppers for their years of support. Looking at the in-store exhibition of the covers, we asked Ramalho how it all went down. "It was all kept a secret," she said, so clients didn't know what the photos were for, but they trusted Daslu and were assured that the pictures wouldn't be randomly published. (Many wealthy Brazilians are cagey about publicity, for security reasons.)

The first 30 photos were single shots of women, but as the process continued, clients were encouraged to bring their husbands and children, to add some diversity to the images—one cover comprises an entire family portrait, with over ten members posing. Somehow, the project was kept hush-hush, and none of the subjects were alerted in advance of their cover debut.

When production wrapped and the magazines went out, Brazil's elite burned up the phone lines proudly comparing their profiles. The exhibition was installed subsequently so that the participants could see what everyone else's covers looked like. Across the board, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. But the truest mark of the project's success, Ramalho told us, is that almost every client photographed has asked for a digital copy of their cover—requests she's been happy to oblige. "The cover then becomes a family memento," she beamed.

Those 375 shoppers would likely have been lifetime clients even without their own Daslu fashion shoots and magazine covers, but the extra personal touch no doubt guarantees their return. We're not advocates of copying, but if there was ever a marketing move to be inspired by, this is it.

—Jason Campbell