Annual Conference & Team Build

For Beiersdorf South Africa’s 2020 Annual Conference, the brief extended beyond bringing employees together. Working alongside the Beiersdorf South Africa HR team, we wanted to create a connected three-part experience that could move more than 100 delegates through business strategy, celebration and team building while giving them one consistent way to navigate the entire journey.

The conference theme, Bigger. Better. Faster. Together., became both the creative direction and a practical principle for how the experience was designed.

Technology formed part of the infrastructure from the outset.

Delegate gifting included custom Samsung employee gift sets, transforming a traditional conference takeaway into something with immediate utility. The technology connected directly into a custom-built conference platform where delegates could access schedules, speaker profiles and indemnity forms, while a real-time sharing environment allowed photographs and video from across the experience to become part of the conference as it happened.

This digital layer connected a programme deliberately designed to change pace and environment over three distinct experiences.

The journey began at Beiersdorf’s Umhlanga head office, where each business unit was given its own breakout environment and the freedom to determine how its annual feedback and projections would be presented. Rather than treating internal reporting as a series of identical presentations, the format encouraged teams to turn business information into more engaging moments of storytelling and participation.

The second day moved to the Zimbali Fairmont Hotel for company strategy and collaboration before transitioning into Digital Jungle, an evening celebration built around glowing bars, digital installations and performances by Veranda Panda and Shekhinah.

For the final team build, we deliberately moved away from the conventional conference environment altogether. The hotel’s underground parking area became the setting for an F1-inspired experience connected to the Supply Chain department, incorporating a Red Bull brand partnership and a series of data-led challenges designed around speed, performance and teamwork.

Across three days, different venues, business objectives and formats were held together by one experience architecture and one digital ecosystem.

Staged just a week before South Africa entered the Covid-19 lockdown, the conference unintentionally anticipated how important connected technology would soon become to the way people work and communicate.

For us, its relevance remains broader than that moment.

It demonstrated that technology in an experience does not need to sit on the sidelines as entertainment. Properly integrated, it can connect people, information, gifting and content while making the physical experience itself easier and more useful.