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Campaign Spotlight – Crep Check

Jack Bamfield

Jack Bamfield

August 2, 2019

Starting this month, we will be sharing with you an example of a campaign which has delivered amazing results for a client over the course of the previous month.

This month, we produced Crep Check for Farfetch, a luxury fashion retailer. The campaign looks at the most valuable trainers currently on the market, as well as those that have seen their value skyrocket since their initial release.

We teamed up with Stadium Goods to provide a definitive breakdown of the most valuable and appreciative trainers in modern times, and an explanation as to why so many of these shoes have become worth such vast sums of money.

Costing £22,763, The high-top ‘Jasper’ sneaker from the Kanye West x Louis Vuitton line are the most valuable on the market. Released in 2009, the shoes designed by West himself have increased by more than 2500%. They were initially available in three colourways but the pink and grey version is the most coveted.

We found that Nike’s What the Dunk trainers had the biggest value increase. Released in 2007 at £91, they were designed as a patchwork of previous patterns, colours and materials used in old Nike SB models. Today, they are worth £3,793, an increase of over 4000%.

We took inspiration for the campaign from high-profile trainer auctions and one-off celebrity releases, which have been sold for tens of thousands of pounds. The international news interest these stories generate inspired us to create a definitive list using data provided by one of Farfetch’s key brands.

We also liked the idea of showcasing trainers as alternative investments, a concept we previously explored with coins and toy cars. Lifestyle, fashion, and money journalists love to follow the most recent collectable trends and valuations in fashion.

Our designs took inspiration from ‘sneaker walls’, similar to those found in Stadium Goods’ stores in New York and Los Angeles. We also used price tags to show the rank number, making the campaign feel more like a high-end fashion index.  We then researched each shoe using Stadium Goods’ index to provide some context to their value increase.

‘Crep Check’ launched on the 26th June, and to date, our outreach team have delivered 98 links totalling 3367 LinkScore (Verve’s own tool using a combination of metrics to measure the value of links). We were also able to build links in seven different countries.

Our outreach coincided with an auction of the world’s rarest trainers in New York set up by Sotheby’s and Stadium Goods. This included one of the first-ever shoes made by Nike in 1972, which sold for £350,000. The interest in this auction meant journalists were receptive to a report about the subject to inform their story.

It also coincided with a PR storm involving Nike removing a limited-edition shoe from retail following complaints about the use of the ‘Betsy Ross’ flag, which has since been associated with white supremacy after its use as the original US flag.

Both stories helped us to get linked coverage for the client in Business Insider, CNBC, GQ, Houston Chronicle, Yahoo Finance, AD (Netherlands’ second-largest newspaper) and CNN’s Style section. In addition, the BBC’s Newsround team wrote an article about the world’s most valuable trainers using the campaign data.

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