Sarenza #ChangerLeCode Rewrites the Rules on Gender in Tech
Sarenza's #ChangerLeCode is a purpose-led film campaign created by Serviceplan France, published in France in March 2019, that exposes the gender stereotypes preventing women from entering digital and coding professions by showing men casually assuming that displayed code was written by another man.
The campaign launched on International Women's Day, March 8, 2019, positioning Sarenza not as a shoe retailer promoting its autumn/winter catalogue but as a brand prepared to use its platform to address structural inequality. As documented on Ads of the World, #ChangerLeCode was developed in direct partnership with Becomtech, an organisation working to promote gender equality across digital and coding professions in France. That partnership gave the campaign institutional credibility beyond advertising and anchored it to an ongoing advocacy mission rather than a seasonal moment.
The campaign's title translates directly as "change the code" — a double meaning that operates simultaneously as a call to reform the unwritten cultural rules that discourage women from technical careers and as a literal reference to programming. In France, where gender representation in technology remains a documented concern, that layered language carried specific weight. Hélène Boulet Supau, Director General at Sarenza, stated plainly that women represent only sixteen percent of tech employees, framing the campaign's existence as a response to a measurable problem rather than an abstract aspiration.
The campaign consists of a single film asset, as recorded on Clapboard.com. Its brevity is strategic. Rather than diffusing its argument across multiple formats, #ChangerLeCode concentrates its narrative force into one tightly constructed piece of communication. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 61 out of 100, reflecting its coherent purpose-led concept and clean creative execution within the constraints of a single-asset, film-format release.
Sarenza recognised that purpose-led brand communication represented a meaningful departure from its established retail positioning. The brand's pre-2019 identity was built around the proposition "Serious about shoes," as documented by La Réclame, signalling category expertise rather than cultural engagement. By 2019, according to reporting archived on Clapboard.com, Sarenza was actively repositioning toward values-driven communication, and #ChangerLeCode represented the most visible expression of that shift.
The strategic rationale was rooted in a specific consumer insight articulated by Boulet Supau, as reported by Ads of the World: that the barrier keeping women out of technical professions is fundamentally cultural, not structural, and that changing it is "everyone's business." Sarenza's choice to act on that insight through advertising — rather than through internal HR policy alone — reflected a deliberate decision to convert brand reach into social advocacy. The partnership with Becomtech was not decorative; it connected Sarenza's campaign to an organisation with direct expertise in the problem being addressed.
In France's online footwear and apparel sector, Sarenza competed against Zalando, Spartoo, and ASOS, as identified in research compiled by Clapboard.com. Zalando in particular had established a dominant pan-European presence, making differentiation on product range alone increasingly difficult. Sarenza had recorded more than one hundred million visits in 2018, according to Mordor Intelligence, which demonstrated meaningful audience scale but also underlined the competitive pressure the brand faced from larger international platforms. Against that backdrop, committing to a purpose narrative offered Sarenza a form of distinctiveness that product catalogues and discount mechanics could not replicate. The campaign appeared at a moment when French consumers were showing heightened receptivity to brands that engaged authentically with social questions, giving #ChangerLeCode a favourable cultural context for its message.
Serviceplan France directed the creative execution of #ChangerLeCode with a concept built around revelation and implicit bias. The film's mechanism is precise: it presents men responding to lines of code on a screen and assuming, without question, that the author is male. The assumption is not dramatised as villainy but rendered as reflex — which is precisely what makes it effective as social commentary. The decision to show bias operating casually, rather than maliciously, is the campaign's central creative insight.
Joint Chief Creative Officers Fabien Teichner and Dimitri Guerassimov led the creative direction at Serviceplan France, as documented by Ads of the World and confirmed in Clapboard.com's production records. Art Director Damien Veillet shaped the visual language of the film. The production credits are publicly documented to this degree, though further crew details below directorial level are not available in the archived record.
The double meaning embedded in the campaign title — "changer le code" as both "change the code" in a programming sense and "change the unwritten rules" in a social sense — demonstrates a level of linguistic precision that is difficult to achieve in French-language advertising without the wordplay feeling forced. Here it functions naturally because the film's visual narrative earns both interpretations simultaneously. The single-asset format, a discipline that demands the film carry the entire communicative load, was met with a clean narrative arc that does not require additional media touchpoints to resolve. The International Women's Day timing, as reported by Ads of the World, amplified distribution without requiring the creative to make that timing explicit within the film itself, preserving the work's longevity beyond a single calendar moment.
No independently verified performance data for #ChangerLeCode — such as view counts, earned media reach, or brand-lift metrics — is publicly available in any named industry source consulted for this analysis. The campaign was not found among the winners or shortlists of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC, as confirmed by research across those bodies' public records. Serviceplan's own 2019 awards summary, as published by House of Communication, reported two silver and four bronze Effies for that year, though those recognitions were attributed to separate campaigns including Adoptify, Penny, and BVG, not to #ChangerLeCode.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several compounding factors. Its International Women's Day release date, confirmed by Ads of the World, created a natural distribution window with heightened media attention and social conversation around gender equity. The Becomtech partnership provided an advocacy network likely to amplify the film organically among audiences already engaged with gender parity in digital professions in France. The campaign's single-film format imposed creative discipline and concentrated audience attention rather than dispersing it across formats.
The Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its purpose-led concept with clarity and craft but whose measurable footprint in industry recognition and documented performance data limits a higher assessment. The strategic pivot it represented for Sarenza — from product-led to purpose-led communication in a competitive French online retail market — is analytically significant regardless of the metrics available, because it marked a documented repositioning moment for the brand.
#ChangerLeCode is a film campaign created by Serviceplan France for Sarenza, published in France in March 2019. It was developed in partnership with Becomtech and launched on International Women's Day to challenge the gender stereotypes that limit women's participation in digital and coding professions. The campaign title means both "change the code" and "change the rules."
Serviceplan France created #ChangerLeCode for Sarenza. Joint Chief Creative Officers Fabien Teichner and Dimitri Guerassimov led the creative direction, with Art Director Damien Veillet shaping the film's visual approach, as documented by Ads of the World and Clapboard.com.
The film showed men casually assuming that code displayed on screen was written by another man. That unremarked reflex — not dramatised hostility — was the campaign's argument. As Sarenza's Director General Hélène Boulet Supau noted, women represent only sixteen percent of tech employees, making the assumption both common and consequential.
Becomtech is an organisation promoting gender equality in digital and coding professions in France. Sarenza partnered with Becomtech to give #ChangerLeCode institutional credibility and connect the campaign to an active advocacy network, moving the work beyond a one-time advertising moment into a sustained engagement with gender parity in employment.
#ChangerLeCode was not found among the winners or shortlists at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC, based on publicly available records reviewed for this analysis. Serviceplan's 2019 Effie wins, per House of Communication, were attributed to separate campaigns.
#ChangerLeCode holds a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100. The score reflects a coherent purpose-led concept executed with creative clarity in a single-film format, balanced against a limited public footprint in verified performance data and major industry award recognition for this specific campaign.
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