Selling shoes that don’t exist: how we built First Pitch by Reebok

A few weeks ago, Reebok launched a shoe that didn’t exist. Fifteen minutes later, it had sold out. This is the story of the platform behind that — what Reebok asked for, what we built, and what it took to keep a crowdfunding site standing while sneakerheads hammered it.

The ask: flip the production model

The fashion industry has a waste problem — brands guess what will sell, produce at scale, and eat the misses. Reebok wanted to invert that: pitch a limited-edition design to the people who care most, and only make the shoe if they show up for it. As I put it at the time: all they wanted to do was flip the fashion industry’s production model on its head. No big deal.

The mechanics, which we shaped together: each design goes live as a campaign for up to 30 days with a 500-pair minimum. Pricing starts at $1 — and climbs a dollar with every pair ordered, up to retail. Early believers get rewarded with the lowest prices and first delivery. Hit the threshold and Reebok makes the shoe; miss it, everyone’s refunded and the next design steps up. First Pitch by Reebok was born.

Why not just use Kickstarter?

Reebok’s team looked at the usual suspects — Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe. All of them were too rigid: no real ecommerce integration, no control over the experience, no room for the climbing-price model at all. They needed a crowdfunding engine they owned.

That’s where our corner of the WordPress world paid off. We know IgnitionDeck — the WordPress crowdfunding platform — inside and out, and it gave us the campaign engine without locking us into anyone’s theme or checkout. We paired it with WooCommerce for the commerce layer. Two open-source tools that already speak WordPress, integrated instead of invented.

The one piece nobody sells off a shelf: the pricing. A dollar-per-pair climb that eventually freezes at retail is a hybrid of dynamic and static pricing that no plugin offered. So we wrote one — a custom WordPress plugin that watches orders and reprices the campaign in real time. That plugin is the heart of the whole platform.

The infrastructure: built to be crushed

Crowdfunded drops have the worst possible traffic profile: near-zero on a quiet Tuesday, then everyone at once the second a campaign goes live. We hosted on Pantheon, whose platform scales resources on demand — and whose Multidev environments let our team work on isolated copies of the site and merge cleanly. Having Pantheon as the backbone of what we deliver for clients is always a huge win. It gives me peace of mind.

Deployments ran through Branch CI: every push built our assets, ran the checks, and deployed to Pantheon automatically. On an aggressive timeline, deploy-on-every-push with early failure flags saved us days of “wait, which version is on staging?” Plus the unglamorous supporting cast — WPack for front-end tooling, Stop User Enumeration because a launch this visible gets scanned by bots within hours.

Worth saying out loud: we’re a ten-person, all-remote team spread across six time zones. Small agency, household-name client, no margin for chaos. The tooling isn’t overhead — it’s what makes that combination work.

Launch day

The first campaign sold out in fifteen minutes. Traffic spiked exactly like we feared and the site didn’t blink — orders flowed, the price climbed dollar by dollar, and the campaign closed with every pair claimed. The early supporters who took a chance on a $1 shoe got it cheapest and get it first.

For Reebok, that’s validation with zero wasted production. For us, it’s the project we point to when someone asks what a small WordPress team can actually do: take an idea no platform supported, assemble it from open-source parts plus one sharp custom plugin, and have it survive its own success on day one.

The full write-up with the numbers lives in the First Pitch case study — and if you’ve got an idea the off-the-shelf platforms can’t hold, that’s our favorite kind of project.