This is the story of an app that changed the way adidas looks at marketing and sales. With a small team, a total disregard for the normal patterns and behaviours that govern marketing launches, and totally new models for awareness, sales, payment, delivery, support, community and promotion. This was a start-up setting out to disrupt everything, but from within one of football’s biggest and most established corporate giants.

That start-up has created adidas’ second biggest-selling football franchise online, just behind Predator – a boot that is sold worldwide, with over two decades history and budgets that are well over 10x those for GLITCH. Achieved without any premiership football stars and without the usual expenditure.

The goal was to attract a new audience: street/league players - a cynical inner-city audience that isn’t swayed by celebrity sponsorship and the traditional marketing mix. They’re playing for show as much as the score - skill is the biggest factor. They’re mobile-only, not mobile first, and heavily vested in social media. The GLITCH app was designed to reach young players where they spent most of their time – on their phones, online, on the move.

GLITCH is now live in London, Berlin & Paris. The app houses everything in the customer journey from their first interaction with the product, through to booking and purchasing, to delivery and rewards. The product can ONLY be bought through the app – even today. These boots weren’t and still aren’t available in stores or even at adidas.com.

At launch, in each country, we deliberately started small and kept it personal. We locked the fitting and purchase functions of the app, making it invite only. With codes only available through a small community of influencers at launch and then only available from other buyers. Our influencers were part of the design of the boots and fed into the concept. Then they led the launch activity, handing out invite codes, uploading content to build community and answering customer questions – online and in the app itself.

The pattern was the same everywhere… GLITCH trended immediately and boots were in demand from day one. Players took to social media begging for referral codes from their contacts. In two countries, we made it into the ‘HOT this Week’ list in the Apple app store. We saw access codes and boots being sold on eBay – and that remains true even now: boots and codes are still being traded for a premium.

GLITCH remains the most engaging content from adidas on social, delivering 1.5x adidas norms. The conversion rate for invite codes is over 75% - beating all member-get-member schemes. 17% of people buy, making an average 1.8 purchases each. All from a base of 250,000 downloads – with retention rates for app usage that are 10x industry averages.

This was achieved with an absolute minimum media spend, zero advertising or sponsorship and no celebrity endorsement. GLITCH turned the industry upside down and created a completely new relationship between a brand and consumer.