OVERVIEW
The sneaker culture and marketplace is saturated with experience pervasive with a strong bias towards the more affluent or people with status. Additionally the technology that is available to make regular “drops” of the newest, coveted sneaker has been taken over by bots or the most luckiest. The secondary market has grown exponentially over the past 5 years resulting in an increase in value, increase in demand, increase in customization but, ultimately, decreasing supply. The challenge becomes, how do you find a space that is unique and appeals to all, but especially the underserved population?
+200%
increase in sneaker-related violence in the U.S. since 2020
Nike’s SNKR app is ”best in the market,” offering unique and tailored drops, however most customers walked away empty handed
Most apps in the market are geared to users the most loyal and engaged shoe buyers — the so-called "hypebeasts” with no room for casual fans
Those who lose out on drops are often left to either miss out on the sneakers they were hoping to buy or to pay a big markup on eBay or GOAT
Buying and selling sneakers is a “serious second-income business, suggesting the only difference between an enthusiast and a hawker is how much money they make”
Playing off a construct for the game, we came up with a simple framework that would guide us but also keep us honest in terms of maintaining simplicity and focus on the experience.
We wanted to expand our understanding through co-creation. We designed workshops across New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and intentional to include a wide-range of audiences. Since we were hoping to target a younger population, it was also important to ensure we had parents involved as well.
Coming out of co-creation we learned a lot more than we had anticipated. The energy and ideas were great, and this allowed us the rethink the journey and define better, meaningful moments that opened up even more opportunities for us. One of our biggest shifts in focus was pushing to “gamify” the experience, redefining the user journey to place emphasis on fitness as currency.
We started our process by revisiting the extensive knowledge and experience we had assembled across the industry. We turned our eyes back to the market to go deeper on our understanding to see what we might have been missing.
APPROACH
CEO, Ryan Mullins, left his job as Director of Future Trends at Adidas on August 31, 2019. Stepping away from that world, he wanted to continue to fuel his passion for sneakers and had a vision for how the market would evolve in the digital world. Drawing inspiration from the popular game “Pokémon Go,” he recruited a small but dedicated team, which included myself as a creative consultant, to bring his vision to life.
Ryan had always had the vision for developing a sneaker experience around the term “Aglet” which refers to the end of the shoe laces. “They are unknown but vital to the lacing system; overlooked and underestimated.”
THE SOLUTION
Working with Ryan and illustrator Dan Freebairn (Kickposters), we set out to create a fresh design language that was differentiated but scalable enough to traverse gender, age, and location.
The dialogue and language in the sneaker sub-culture is varied and applies to different types of meaning. We wanted to make sure to maintain that notion of dialogue and community both in words and visuals. It was also equally apparent that locations had different variations so we wanted to maintain authenticity.
As we started to dive into the journeys and wireframes, we new the first time app experience was going to be critical so we spent a good deal of time on getting it right. We also used early stage explorations to work out some of the design language and patterns, with a good deal of reliance on interaction models.
To add to the stickiness we created, we expanded our capabilities to include the creation of exclusivity with unique drops, designing quests that users can do on their own or as a team, and giving users the opportunity to amplify and share their experiences uniquely. We were also looking to attract partnership to create additional monetization opportunities.
Tying in fitness and attaching “steps to sneakers” was a big differentiator for us and created a new currency
To create additional stickiness, we wanted to create flows that highlighted moments unique to the user and acknowledge the achievement in big ways.
OUTCOMES
Beyond building in more functionality, Ryan Mullins’ vision is to extend the experience to apparel and other add-ons to create a design studio that showcases the best virtual designs and brings users’ ideas to the real world. Mullins calls it the “Smart Aglet Sneaker Studio”. “[It’s] where you can design your own sneakers in the standard design style and we’ll put those in the game. We’ll let you design your own hoodies and then [Aglet] does become a YouTube for fashion design. I want to build a virtual design platform where kids can build their own brands for virtual fashion brands and put them into this game environment that I’m building in the first phase,” said Mullins. “Brian’s involvement was critical at the very early stages of ideation. We could have gone in so many directions but he set the strategy straight and was instrumental in keeping us centered throughout the testing phase. We were ultimately able to get so much value out in the early days that our users were left wanting more.”
– Ryan Mullins, CEO, Aglet
8.4B
Steps that users walked in a single year (or over 4 million miles in total)
3.8M
People digitally-active and enrolled in the app within the first year of its launch
$4.5M
Seed money secured in the first three months of the beta launch of the app