Adidas was about to release its greatest running shoe—The Ultraboost19, and they wanted to get sneakerheads across America excited to buy the shoes. The only catch was— all we had was a picture of what this shoe looked like. So our brief was to get sneaker enthusiasts talking about a shoe that hadn’t even been released, and have them visit adidas.com to sign up to get on the waitlist.

We used augmented reality to create AR Drops, the first ever digital shoe try-on experience, where you could point your phone at your feet and it would turn your shoes into the Ultraboost19. So you could try the shoes right through your phone, from wherever you are.

Then, we went to all our competitor’s stores to find customers in the market for new sneakers, and used Apple’s AirDrop (a feature used to share pictures and videos) to drop our digital shoe right onto people’s phones. So for the first time ever, people were trying adidas shoes— in Nike stores.

We realized that our demographic, sneakerheads, thinks about sneakers in three places— stores where they buy sneakers, events where they go to show-off their sneakers, and Snapchat— where they post about their newest sneakers.

So we wanted to hijack every single major sneaker store and fashion boutique in New York, LA, Houston, Chicago and have people who are in the market for new sneakers, try-on OUR sneakers instead.

Then we dropped the experience onto people’s phones at basketball games, hip-hop concerts and most importantly— Snapchat to get everyone deep in the sneaker culture talking about it.

The week of the Ultraboost19 launch, people shopping in Nike stores got a notification via Apple’s AirDrop: “Ultraboost19 is here, be the first to try it on”. When they clicked this digital flyer, it opened up a first-of-its-kind augmented reality experience that let them try on the new adidas sneaker, just by pointing their phone at their feet. So they could try on adidas shoes, in Nike stores. We did this across all major competitor stores, fashion boutiques, basketball games and hip-hop concerts. We even put the AR experience on Snapchat, so anyone could try on this unreleased shoe wherever they were. Over 60 Million digital pairs of shoes were tried on in the first day.

60 Million shoe try-ons

2.4 Million visits to adidas.com to sign up for release updates

12% increase in brand favorability

Shoe sold out in under an hour

Subsequent release sold out in 10 minutes