Ahead of the busy festive shopping period, Argos has launched an app aimed at children putting together their Christmas lists.

Argos Wishlist, targeted at three to seven year-olds, provides a simple, picture-driven way for children to put together a wish list of gifts, guided by a set of new Helper mascots developed specifically for this project.

The app snaps a photo of the young user, then presents them with a 3,000-strong selection of Argos most popular toys. Once theyve picked out what they want, child can personalise a mood board with pictures of each item, adding stickers and drawings, before pressing the Send to Santa button.

This is then sent to parents, via an email address they input to the app, with more details on each product and a link to buy them online. Parental controls also make it possible to set a budget, and a maximum number of products children can add to their list.

Speaking to Mobile Marketing, Argos head of digital innovation Neil Tinegate said: “We were aware of childrens behaviour of circling stuff in our catalogues and ripping out pages to show parents what they want for Christmas, and our research showed that one in five under-10s still do this today. With Wishlist, were trying to recreate that behaviour digitally.”

The app originated as the winning idea at a hackathon event for Argos staff and partners back in March. After the idea was greenlit, Argos internal teams worked together with developer REPL to create the app.

Since it launched for iOS and Android on 14 October, the app has attracted organic downloads into the five figures, according to Tinegate, and is currently seeing an average dwell time of around 13 minutes. The open rate of lists emailed to parents stands between 50-60 per cent. “And were seeing really good click-through on the back of this,” said Tinegate, putting this success down to the personalised nature of the emails.