How Liberty London ran their Beauty Advent Calendar Open Call on Dapple
Liberty London's annual Beauty Advent Calendar Open Call is one of the most sought-after commissions in British art and design. When Liberty needed a platform that could handle the volume, the rigour, and the prestige — they chose Dapple.
Background
Who is Liberty London, and what is the Advent Calendar Open Call?
Liberty London is one of the world's great department stores — a Tudor-fronted institution on Great Marlborough Street that has been at the heart of British creative culture since 1875. Known globally for its signature print fabrics and its extraordinary curation of beauty, fashion, and homeware, Liberty is as much a cultural institution as it is a retailer.
At the centre of Liberty's festive calendar sits the Beauty Advent Calendar — a yearly collector's piece that commands waitlists, generates international press coverage, and sells out reliably each autumn. For 2027, Liberty threw open the design commission to the public with an open call — inviting artists from across the UK to submit their interpretation of the Liberty building and its surrounding London landscape.
The prize: £15,000, a close collaboration with Liberty's in-house creative teams, and a piece of work that will appear in thousands of homes. The stakes were high. The volume of interest was significant. And Liberty needed a submissions platform that could handle both.
The 2026 campaign with Helena Bonham Carter
The Challenge
What does running a high-profile open call at enterprise scale actually require?
Liberty's team didn't just need a form. They needed an end-to-end process — from secure, authenticated submission intake through to a structured shortlisting workflow and in-person finalist presentations. With a brand of Liberty's stature, the applicant experience had to be as polished as the prize itself.
Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) was a non-negotiable. Liberty's teams operate within a managed identity environment, and any external platform needed to integrate seamlessly — without creating new login credentials or IT headaches for the team managing the call.
The review process also needed structure. With hundreds of applications arriving — each including original artwork, a design narrative, and supporting sketches — the team required a way to move entries through stages systematically: from initial review, to a shortlist, to a curated group of finalists invited to present in person at Liberty's London HQ.
Getting Started
How did Liberty get set up on Dapple?
Dapple's team worked directly with Liberty to configure enterprise Single Sign-On before the call went live. This meant Liberty's staff could access the platform through their existing identity provider — no separate accounts, no password management, and no security exceptions needed. For a retailer operating at Liberty's scale, that was the first real test of whether Dapple could meet enterprise requirements. It passed.
The submission form was configured to capture everything Liberty needed: the artwork as a PDF, an artist biography with contact details, and a design research document with development sketches and a written narrative of up to 250 words. Clear, purposeful fields — nothing surplus, nothing missing.
Liberty published the open call on their website with a direct link to the Dapple submissions portal — openly noting that entries were managed via Dapple. Transparency to applicants, and confidence in the platform.
Review & Shortlisting
How did Liberty's team review hundreds of applications efficiently?
When applications closed, Liberty's team had hundreds of entries to assess — each a piece of original artwork from a UK-based artist, submitted in the hope of landing one of the most prestigious design commissions in British retail. With a tight timeline, they needed to do this in less than a week.
The Stages board was where the work happened. Liberty's reviewers could see all submitted works side by side — images displayed at a glance, without clicking in and out of individual records. As the team assessed each piece, they could drag and drop entries through the stages: from the initial submission pool, into review, into a shortlist, and finally into the finalist group selected for in-person presentation.
The visual, kanban-style workflow meant the team could keep a clear picture of where each application sat — how many had been reviewed, how many were in contention, how many were on the shortlist. For a team managing a call of this prestige, with real accountability to shortlisted artists and internal stakeholders, that visibility mattered.
Hundreds of applications reviewed through a single, structured workflow
Stages board gave a visual overview of all works side by side
Drag-and-drop movement from submission pool through to shortlist
Shortlisted artists automatically separated for the next phase
Finalist group identified and invited to present at Liberty's London HQ
Closing the Loop with Every Applicant
How did Liberty follow up with all applicants at scale?
When the call concluded, Liberty wanted to ensure every artist who had submitted felt genuinely valued — not just the finalists. The volume of entries had been extraordinary, and the quality and effort across the board was clear. Rather than a generic automated rejection, Liberty used Dapple's messaging platform to send personalised communications to all applicants, thanking them for their work.
They also wanted to send each entrant a Liberty sketchbook as a gift — a thoughtful gesture that reflected the brand's relationship with the creative community. To do that, they needed addresses. So within the same message, they asked entrants to reply with their postal details. Hundreds of replies came back through Dapple, all in one place. From there, it was a single click to export the full address list into a spreadsheet — ready to hand straight to the fulfilment team. No chasing, no manual copying, no second platform.
Finalist Presentations
How did Dapple support the final stage of the judging process?
The Liberty open call didn't end at digital submission. Shortlisted artists were invited to Liberty's head office in central London to present their concepts in person to a panel of Liberty experts — a final round that reflected both the seriousness of the commission and the significance of the relationship between Liberty and its chosen artist.
Dapple was used to manage the invitation process for those finalists — reaching out directly through the platform to the artists selected to present, with travel costs covered up to £200 per artist. This kept all communication within the system that had managed the entire lifecycle of the call: no switching to separate email threads, no risk of an applicant falling through the cracks at the most important stage.
The 2026 winning entry
Results
What did Liberty achieve by running the open call on Dapple?
Liberty ran a high-profile, high-volume open call — one of the most prestigious artist commissions in UK retail — entirely on Dapple, from initial submission intake through to finalist selection and in-person presentations. The process was structured, transparent, and auditable at every stage.
| Before Dapple | Area | With Dapple |
|---|---|---|
| Manual handling of artwork submissions across email or generic form tools | Submission intake | Structured Dapple form capturing artwork PDF, biography, and design narrative in one place |
| Separate logins and credentials for the review team | Access & security | Enterprise SSO — team accessed Dapple through existing identity provider, no new accounts |
| Spreadsheets and colour-coding to track review progress | Review workflow | Visual Stages board with drag-and-drop progression from submission to shortlist |
| Switching between tools to communicate with shortlisted artists | Finalist communications | Finalist invitations sent directly through Dapple — the same system that managed the full call |
| No single source of truth for where each application stood | Visibility | Full team visibility across hundreds of applications at every stage of the process |
The full workflow — intake, review, shortlisting, applicant communication, and finalist management — stayed in one system throughout, giving the team speed without sacrificing control.
Summary
Why does Dapple work for high-prestige creative commissions?
The Liberty Beauty Advent Calendar Open Call is not a typical submissions programme. It carries the weight of a 150-year-old brand, a world-famous product, and a prize that genuinely changes an artist's career. The team running it needed a platform that could hold that weight — enterprise security, structured review, and a process that felt worthy of the commission it was serving.
Dapple delivered on all three. SSO meant no IT friction at onboarding. The Stages board turned a potential admin marathon into a genuine curatorial process. And managing everything from submission to finalist invitation in a single platform meant nothing slipped, nothing was missed, and the team could focus on the decisions that actually mattered: finding the right artist.
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