A Feast of Fantasy

We’ve recently completed a project for The Wam Bam Club, a leading burlesque supper club based in The Bloomsbury Ballroom, a historic 1920’s Art Deco Venue in the heart of London.

For a number of years, Wam Bam was a resident of Café De Paris, again based in London, but as the show grew more popular, they needed a change of venue. This prompted a review of the existing overall look and feel of the brand. And a bigger and better website.

We initially met with the team at Wam Bam to get a clearer understanding of which direction they were taking the show in and got more insight to what was needed to achieve their goals. We then had the Wam Bam experience! The show really is non-stop, energetic and fast paced, with each cabaret act having only minutes to perform. Whilst the performers are weaving in and out of the tables, the waiters are also serving dinner. Sounds like mayhem, but is timed to perfection.

Surprisingly, there are more females in the audience, but once you’ve seen the show, you understand that the attraction for them is escapism into a world of fantasy. To get the full Wam Bam experience, many of them get involved with the burlesque classes before the show starts.

This understanding gave us a steer for the positioning, combining the supper club element with the style of the show. We defined Wam Bam as ‘A feast of fantasy’ and extended it out to ‘fun’, ‘magic’ etc. We then looked at the brand mark, dressing up a ‘W’ with a traditional laced-up basque used by many of the performers.

A show with impact needed a website with the same extravagance, but it also needed to have a premium art directional feel to it. The starting point was the photography, so we enlisted Leeds based photographer, Guy Farrow, to help bring a style of imagery that was bordering on fantasy. The day of the shoot was much like the show itself, with a constant flow of acts and costume changes, with only a fire drill to interrupt the day. Not good for the performers in their outfits standing outside in the Bloomsbury Gardens, with hundreds of onlookers wondering what was going on. Amusing, all the same.

Using the new photography, we created a visual extravaganza that is easy to navigate, informative, without being too content heavy and interactive, so the viewer could see live twitter feeds and images from the show as they happen. We also built the website to be responsive, without losing too many of the rich features when viewed on mobile devices. With Eventbrite linked to the site, and an easy-to-use event calendar, the booking user experience is now much easier than the previous website.

We’re happy with the result of all the hard work. And It’s always great when you get introduced to new clients via recommendations from existing clients as it proves you deliver results consistently, but pressure to deliver great results is always the same no matter how you win the work. We really wanted to make our mark with the Wam Bam project and we think we have achieved what we set out to do.