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The adidas Campus 80s MakerLab introduces a new type of collaborative shoe design. Blue Bite helps tell the story.
MakerLab is adidas’ collaborative-creation platform; for the Campus 80s project, the brand invited three sneaker designers — Helen Kirkum, Alex Nash and Shun Hirose — to their headquarters in Germany to design a new take on the classic Campus shoe. The designers then oversaw the production at a factory in Vietnam.
A shoe launch period, from initial design to retail availability, is usually 18-24 months. This MakerLab project aimed to shorten that time period to just a few months.
Avoiding traditional retail channels, adidas launched the limited-edition run of 333 pairs for each design via a StockX IPO (initial product offering). This empowered the buyer to set the retail price, and, importantly, give all consumers an equal chance to purchase the shoes while keeping bots away.
In total, almost 10,000 bids were received on the 999 total shoes available. Curious about which design received the highest bids? Check out the StockX recap.
A number of elements came together to make the Campus 80s MakerLab project particularly unique, including the designers, the speed and the sales process. adidas needed a way to tell these stories in new and engaging ways.
“We live by an elevated model of collaboration that embraces the collective. Many times that means taking the passenger seat and acting as an enabler of our partners’ creative vision coming to life."
When tapped with a phone, an NFC tag embedded in the tongue of each shoe activates a mobile experience custom to that particular shoe. This powers the shoes to tell their own story, directly to the end consumer.
The Blue Bite experience changes based on a number of contextual elements: object-based, location-based and language-based.
Because the Experience is object-based, tapping a shoe activates an experience custom to the creator of that particular shoe. In addition, users will find the documentary and additional information about their specific shoes and the project in general.
This level of customization could open additional opportunities for designers to continue to add to their story and communicate directly with consumers in different ways over time.
The experience is also custom to the user, recognizing the phone’s language settings and location to display the appropriate language, ensuring the story reaches as many people as possible.
These designers used their adidas shoe designs to tell their own story, Blue Bite delivers that story to consumers using the shoes themselves.
