This blog was guest-written by Sherrie Nguyen, Community Manager.

CHEFS Catalog offers top-quality cooking gear to pros and in-home chefs alike – all their customers love to cook. To launch the “Julia [Child] and Jacques [Pepin] Cooking At Home” TV series, cookbook and DVD, they asked customers to share their personal stories about these two favorite chefs.

The response was overwhelming. Not only were they excited to share their stories, but they went on to share pictures of themselves, their families, and even delicious meals they had created. Profile information included their favorite types of food, how cooking makes them feel, and the styles of meals they prefer to cook. All this gives CHEFS – and its customers – great insights into the many types of people who buy from CHEFS.

CHEFS took their campaign a step further by enabling these storytellers to link their stories directly to their favorite CHEFS products, personally recommending them to fellow foodies. By integrating this new Bazaarvoice capability, Social Recommendations™, CHEFS creates true social shopping – customers recommending products to shoppers, based on their profile or stories.

Turns out, CHEFS customers enjoy recommending products – more than a third of the stories collected in the first three days include product links, and many include multiple product recommendations.

Such recommendations get to the heart of social shopping: customer-to-customer selling, where customers help shoppers discover exciting new products they may not have considered. All CHEFS did was give them a place to tell their stories, and the storytellers took it from there.

It’s important to note that this campaign didn’t center on products – it really centered on customers’ love for Julia Child. The product recommendations highlight these cooks’ favorite items, bringing commerce directly into the social realm.

Timing was critical for this first campaign, as the “Julie & Julia” movie premiered on July 28, and the series premiered on July 4. Working together, CHEFS and Bazaarvoice were able to get this campaign live in less than two weeks – and that included integrating links to all of their products.

This is just the first Stories campaign CHEFS has run. Stay tuned for more exciting Stories topics to come!