How REWE Created a Mobile-First Christmas Catalog Experience with Publitas
Location: Germany
Industry: Grocery Retail
Website: www.rewe.de
How REWE Used a Digital Special Catalog to Inspire Shoppers During the Holiday Season
For REWE, Christmas is a seasonal occasion shaped by emotion, inspiration, meal planning, gifting, and the expectation that one retailer can help customers bring the entire festive experience together.
To meet that expectation, REWE developed a dedicated Christmas Special Catalog: a fully digital seasonal experience designed to inspire shoppers, showcase relevant holiday content, and position REWE as a trusted companion throughout the Christmas period. Building on the team’s existing experience, they developed this as a standalone digital concept for the Christmas season.
Using Publitas REWE created a digital-first catalog experience tailored to modern shopping behavior… and especially to mobile users.
“We wanted to move beyond a traditional brochure and create something that truly reflects how people prepare for Christmas today—more inspiration, more guidance, and easier to explore.”
The Objective: Build Inspiration First, Not Just Another Promotional Asset
The primary goal of the Christmas Special Catalog wasn’t centered on just one isolated KPI. Alongside classic performance targets, inspiration, brand impact, and user experience took center stage.
REWE wanted to use the holiday to create an emotionally resonant branded experience and show customers that they could find everything they needed for a successful holiday season at REWE.
The digital Christmas catalog was designed to inspire, create a warm atmosphere, and reinforce REWE’s position as a reliable destination for all Christmas needs.
While many seasonal campaigns are designed around short-term promotional efficiency, REWE took a broader approach. The Christmas catalog needed to serve as a high-quality seasonal touchpoint that combined brand storytelling, practical utility, and product inspiration in a format that customers could explore at their own pace.
Building the Catalog from Scratch: A New Creative Process for a New Format
Because this was REWE’s first dedicated special catalog of this kind, the team couldn’t rely on a previous template or a print-first structure. Instead, they began with a blank page and built the concept iteratively.
The process started with a moodboard to define relevant themes, visual directions, and seasonal atmosphere. From there, the team sketched out the catalog page by page, evolving the concept step by step until the final experience took shape. Early versions looked very different from the finished result, reflecting the project’s exploratory, iterative nature. The final catalog emerged as a cohesive, premium, and atmospheric Christmas experience rather than a standard promotional leaflet translated into digital form.
“It was important for us to deliberately leverage the strengths of the digital format and develop our own creative concept for it, not just a digital version of print. That’s why we built it step by step from scratch.”
This matters because it shows that REWE treated the format as a creative product in its own right. The digital catalog wasn’t just a container for offers, but a curated seasonal environment with its own visual logic, pacing, and content strategy.
The Production Model: Internal Strategy, External Creativity, and Publitas for Digital Execution
The catalog was produced through close collaboration between REWE’s internal core team and external creative partners. REWE defined the structure, content priorities, and strategic guardrails, while internal and external creative teams worked closely together on the design execution, visual worlds, and animations. This division of roles allowed REWE to keep strategic control while drawing on specialist creative capabilities for a richer seasonal experience.
Once the catalog had been produced, Publitas supported the digital publishing process by uploading the final Christmas catalog into the platform, helping integrate it into REWE’s channels, and enabling the tracking needed to evaluate performance. According to REWE, this support was particularly valuable in simplifying and accelerating the digital publication and analysis process.
Mobile-First by Design: Optimizing for the Way Holiday Shoppers Actually Browse
From the beginning, REWE designed the Christmas Special Catalog with a mobile-first mindset, since most users would view it on smartphones. That assumption had a significant impact on the structure and layout of the entire experience.
Each page had to work as a strong standalone unit on smaller screens while still feeling coherent in double-page view. This is a subtle but important design challenge. On desktop or tablet, spreads can create visual immersion, but on mobile, a page has to communicate clearly and elegantly on its own. The design had to balance both contexts simultaneously.
The team also deliberately reduced data weight on mobile devices, especially for animated elements, to ensure fast load times. During peak Christmas traffic, when patience is low and browsing sessions are fast, performance is part of the user experience. REWE recognized that a premium seasonal catalog would only succeed if it remained smooth and accessible under high seasonal demand.
“Mobile was the starting point, not an afterthought. Everything had to work seamlessly on smaller screens while still delivering a rich experience.”
This mobile-first execution helped ensure that the catalog not only looked festive but also worked well in the environment where most users encountered it.
Designing for Usefulness, Not Just Visual Appeal: Interactive Features That Keep Shoppers Inside the Experience
REWE’s approach to interactivity was guided by utility. The goal was not to overload the catalog with clickable features, but to provide meaningful information when it was needed, without sending users away from the experience.
Two interactive elements were especially important:
Product hotspots. These were used to reveal additional product information directly within the catalog, such as more detailed wine content. This gave shoppers more confidence and context without interrupting the browsing journey.
Recipe integrations. Recipes could be opened directly in the catalog via hotspots or overlays. This was especially valuable in a Christmas context, where inspiration, meal planning, and product discovery are closely connected. Rather than forcing users onto separate pages or experiences, REWE kept inspiration and action within a single seamless environment.
Customers could move naturally from seasonal inspiration to product context to planning ideas within one contained experience. That kind of continuity is especially powerful during Christmas, when shoppers are often looking for ideas and inspiration (and not just gifts or groceries).
Distribution Strategy: Building a Dedicated Home on Web and in the App
For distribution, REWE created a dedicated home for the Christmas catalog on both its website and the REWE app, making it easy for customers to find. This gave the catalog a clear and accessible destination within REWE’s owned ecosystem.
REWE promoted the catalog through selected owned and paid channels, supporting it as part of a broader activation strategy rather than simply publishing it and leaving it to perform on its own.
Because this was the first special catalog of its kind, REWE framed the campaign as part of an ongoing test-and-learn phase. The campaign was used to generate insights about channel performance, discovery behavior, and future activation tactics.
Linking Content to Shopping Behavior: A Foundational Step Toward More Actionable Seasonal Experiences
REWE’s answers show that the 2025 Christmas catalog was as much about establishing the right digital structure as it was about immediate transaction-driving mechanics. By giving the catalog a clear home on the website and app and promoting it across owned and paid channels, REWE built the pathways for customers to access and engage with the content.
The emphasis in this first iteration was therefore on discoverability, usability, and engagement rather than on forcing a hard-sell transactional flow. That makes sense in the context of a first-run special catalog. REWE used the campaign to understand how a seasonal digital catalog could function within its broader holiday ecosystem, which creates a strong base for deeper commerce integrations in future editions.
Measurement and Performance: Evaluation Focusing on Reach, Relevance, and Behavioral Signals
To evaluate success, REWE focused primarily on three KPI groups:
- Openings
- Time spent
- Clicks at the channel level
These metrics were especially relevant because they allowed the team to assess both the catalog’s ability to attract an audience and the extent to which the content resonated once users were inside. Openings reflected reach and entry into the experience. Time spent indicated content relevance and browsing depth. Clicks helped show where users engaged most actively and which content paths worked best. REWE used these signals to identify strong user journeys, understand which content performed best, and surface optimization opportunities for future seasonal catalogs.
“This first edition was about understanding behavior - what people engage with, how they browse, and how we can improve the experience going forward.”
Key Learnings from the First Edition: A Full End-to-End Learning Experience
REWE highlighted the value of the experience from early planning through creative development to technical implementation and campaign rollout. That end-to-end learning now serves as an important foundation for future seasonal special catalogs.
Many first-generation digital projects succeed not because they immediately maximize every performance metric, but because they create a repeatable operating model. REWE now has experience in:
- Structuring a seasonal special catalog from scratch
- Designing for mobile-first browsing
- Integrating interactive content into a retail storytelling format
- Embedding the catalog within owned channels, such as web and app
- Supporting distribution with selected paid and owned promotion
- Tracking engagement and using results for future optimization
That combination of creative, technical, and organizational learning is itself a strong business result.
Feedback: Positive Response from Both Customers and Internal Teams
According to REWE, feedback on the Christmas Special Catalog was very positive, both externally and internally. Customers and stakeholders especially appreciated that the catalog demonstrated the potential of a fully digital brochure format and showed how modern, inspiring, and intuitive that experience could be.
This kind of internal response is often critical for long-term adoption. When marketing, category, and other teams recognize the quality and strategic potential of a digital catalog format, it becomes easier to invest in the next iteration and expand its use case into other seasonal or thematic campaigns.
Why Publitas Worked for REWE: Flexibility, Expertise, and a Strong Foundation for Seasonal Innovation
REWE’s assessment of Publitas is especially notable because it goes beyond platform functionality alone. The company highlighted two main strengths:
- Industry expertise. Publitas brought broad retail and category knowledge that offered valuable input for the continued development of REWE’s digital catalog formats.
- Flexibility and customization. The platform gave REWE the freedom to tailor the experience to its own requirements rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all template.
That combination made Publitas a strong partner not just for launching the Christmas Special Catalog, but for helping REWE develop a more mature approach to future seasonal campaigns.
What Comes Next More Value, More Inspiration, Stronger Positioning
Looking ahead, REWE aims to improve both the process and the content in the next version of the Christmas Special Catalog. The main ambition is to further increase the catalog’s value for customers by delivering even more targeted inspiration and further building REWE’s relevance for Christmas shopping.
That suggests a clear direction for future growth: build on the strong technical and creative foundation already established while deepening the content’s editorial and commercial relevance.
Conclusion: From First Experiment to Strategic Seasonal Format
REWE’s Christmas Special Catalog marked the creation of a new digital seasonal format built specifically for how modern customers browse, discover, and engage during the holiday season.
By starting with a blank page, designing mobile-first, using interaction to add value rather than distraction, and embedding the experience across web and app, REWE created a premium digital catalog that combined inspiration, usability, and measurable engagement. Publitas helped provide the technical home, channel integration, and tracking layer that made the project operationally viable and analytically useful.
For REWE, the first edition delivered something highly valuable: proof that a fully digital special catalog can feel modern, intuitive, and brand-building, while also creating a scalable foundation for future seasonal campaigns.
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