Boots is the UK's largest pharmacy-led health and beauty retailer (as if we even need to tell you). With over 2,500 stores in the UK alone, ranging from local community pharmacies to large health and beauty stores, Boots is an unmistakable presence in the country's high streets and homes.

In 2007, Boots Learning was launched. It's an extensive learning system that organises all the company's training in one place and enables its 70,000 employees to improve their skills, progress their careers and serve customers better than ever.

Although Boots Learning was a great success, by 2015 it was time for a change. The portal was redesigned and relaunched to be cleaner, faster and more user-friendly.

The Challenge 

The challenge faced by Boots, Internal Communications team was to raise awareness of the updated Boots Learning Portal in an exciting and engaging way across such a large company. Not only that, but they would have to overcome negative perceptions of how boring and uninspiring training can be.

With the new portal now live, the Internal Comms team was set the task of officially relaunching and repositioning it to their vast employee base. They needed to get across the benefits and features of Boots Learning quickly, and to inspire their audience rather than bore them.

The team had seen the quality of work we'd done for other Boots departments, as well as previous internal communications campaigns we'd delivered. On the back of our creative approaches and proven results, they decided we were the right video agency for the job. (And we're so glad they did!)

Our Solution

We began with research into Boots and its employees. Continuous employee training is an important part of any business, but for large organisations like Boots ensuring that all members of the team feel valuable and invested is a massive and critical task.

We knew that an animation would be the ideal solution to the problem (unsure whether animation or live action would work for you? Read this!). Not only can animation build awareness in a visually exciting way, but it can get across a lot of information quickly and simply. On a tight budget animation would enable us to show how everybody in the Boots team benefits from Boots Learning, without hours of location scouting, filming and shooting.

Most importantly, we knew the flexibility of animation would allow us to create a visual style capable of entertaining Boots employees, contributing to their sense of community and shared goals, and compelling them to log onto the learning portal.

Over 2 weeks we built the animation from scratch. We designed unique character models for reuse across future Boots video content, working closely with the Internal Comms team to ensure a high attention to detail, from the uniforms the characters wore to the data presented in the animation.

Success

Boots were very happy with the finished product, which was completed on time and to budget. With the help of  this engaging animation, Boots successfully relaunched their learning portal and was able to change employees, perceptions of training, inspiring them to engage with the new platform.

Great service, quick turnaround and professional input. The team really understand our business and can turn our ideas into engaging creative content that fits with our brand and project objectives. Venture are a pleasure to work with and I regularly recommend them to others."

- Rachel Turner, Assistant Manager Colleague Engagement

Since then we've been fortunate enough to work with Boots on further projects, and have been added to their official supplier list. Our relationship with the team at Boots, built on mutual respect and collaboration, has gone from strength to strength, here's to many more successful video projects down the road!