First Pitch by Reebok

Cool shoe designs get an equally cool platform

Project Overview

Reebok is an iconic shoe brand, known for their cool and comfortable sneakers. They design and sell everything from professional sports shoes to stunning street shoes for die-hard sneaker-head collectors. They are experts at awesome shoes.

DigiSavvy is a boutique WordPress development and digital marketing agency. We work with clients to design and build cool websites with unique aesthetics and custom functionality. We have the experience to deliver solutions even for special challenges, like Reebok’s.

The Vision

Reebok wanted an innovative platform to pitch new limited-edition shoe designs to shoe-lovers. They had a unique concept of a kickstarter-style  site for sneakers, where the price would start at $1 and go up by one dollar for each shoe ordered, up to the maximum retail price. 

From there, customers would pay the retail price until the shoe sold out or the campaign ended. Only shoes with enough orders would get produced. So Reebok’s concept was for a hybrid pricing approach: dynamic pricing up to retail price, and static pricing from there on.

The Challenge

The fashion industry at-large has a problem. Waste. It accounts for roughly 4% of the world’s waste every year. Manufacturers often produce clothing lines and accessories based on prior sales figures and trending data. While that can help with forecasting, it doesn’t paint a true picture of what will sell. I mean, the fashion industry, like other industries, aren’t great at predicting the future after all. 

That’s when the good folks at Reebok asked What if. What if there were a way to create fashionable and unique designs for only those individuals who wanted them?

Reebok flipped the script altogether and decided to approach things differently—sustainably.

E-commerce websites all tend to work the same way, with static pricing – each item has a fixed price. There are a few other kinds of websites, including crowdfunding sites like kickstarter, where the pricing is dynamic – different people pay different prices. But could an e-commerce site have dynamic pricing? Furthermore, could that website incentivize super-fans to commit to a concept that hadn’t been made yet? 

Could the marriage of do-good ethical-manufacturing and technology help Reebok produce something wildly daring?

The Solution

Reebok is an expert at cool shoe designs and has strong ecommerce support department but wanted an out of the box approach to selling boutique collectible shoes. So Reebok turned to DigiSavvy for our WordPress & WooCommerce experience and building stunning website designs. We also offer the expertise in dynamic pricing Reebok needed through our sister company, Crowdfunding-powerhouse IgnitionDeck, which provides crowd funding functionality to any WordPress site.

DigiSavvy built a custom WordPress site powered by WooCommerce and IgnitionDeck for Reebok. And to succeed at the challenging vision Reebok gave us, we also built Reebok a custom WordPress plugin to implement hybrid dynamic-then-static pricing. Of course, we also made sure that transactions on the new site are secure and that the user experience is excellent. The site went live in August 2020.

The Results

The first campaign that Reebok launched sold out in fifteen minutes! Their site was crushed with traffic but hosting partner, Pantheon, was able to sustain and not crash, with server resources scaling on-demand.

So far, Reebok and DigiSavvy have launched four shoes. The first three were fully funded and are being produced, and the ongoing fourth shoe campaign is halfway there. We’re preparing to launch three more in the coming months.

Together, Reebok and DigiSavvy created a site as cool and successful as the shoes.

“DigiSavvy worked with us to bring our vision for a disruptive new platform for shoe-lovers to life. They were excellent technology partners, succeeding in creating our pricing system and site, and delivering on time and on budget.”

Neil Gole Director, E-Comm Platforms Reebok