Challenged with boosting holiday sales for a shopping-centric e-zine for women ages 24 to 45, MAX Communications created a groundbreaking social shopping she-commerce concept that would drive traffic to the client’s website, as well as boost sales during the critical holiday shopping season.  Designed to tap women’s friendship circles and give women who shop together the only thing they love more than shopping — great deals to share with their friends! — MAX Communications invented an innovative new tool, called “Group-ons”. As shopping-savvy women ourselves, we knew that the “Group-ons” concept was a marketing and PR home run, so we commissioned a national survey to prove that shopping is, indeed, friend-centric for women and that women’s friendship circles are a viable target market for online retailers.

By gaining access to a woman’s circle of friends, through the promise of acquiring special deals just for them (Group-ons), the site would be establishing itself as a new and special friendship marketing channel for retailers around the world. Partnering with such high-end e-tailers as Saks.com, the discount designer clothing emporium Bluefly.com, and a host of others, from Active Endeavors, Beauty Habit and Flight101 to White and Warren, Lesser Evil and Plum Party to Burdick Chocolate, Pangea Organics, Hollywood Fashion Tape, Rosanna, Inc., and others, the MAX Communications Team launched Group-ons on Cyber Monday, the biggest revenue-generating day of the year for e-tailers. One year after its initial launch, the Group-ons concept was sold and relaunched as Groupon, the world’s largest “deal-of-the-day” website that requires group participation for a deal to become available to all.