Breaking the pattern of football boot releases through an invite-only app
adidas GLITCH is a new football boot concept and a unique route to market. With a new generation of players to connect with, POSSIBLE set out to disrupt everything.
The answer for launch? A mobile product and experience that was created, designed, and launched by POSSIBLE. The goal was to attract a new audience of street/league players, a cynical inner-city audience that isn’t swayed by celebrity sponsorship and the traditional marketing mix. 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 and Paris. The GLITCH app houses everything in the customer journey from their first interaction with the product, booking and purchasing, to delivery and rewards. The product can ONLY be bought through the app – even today. These boots aren’t available in stores or even online.
At launch in each country, POSSIBLE and adidas deliberately started small and kept it personal. They locked the fitting and purchase functions of the app, making it invite-only. Codes were only available through a small community of influencers and then only available from purchasers of the boots. 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 in the app and answering customer questions – online and in the app itself.
GLITCH is now adidas’ second biggest-selling football franchise online behind Predator, a boot that has over two decades’ history and budgets that are well over 10 times those for GLITCH. Achieved without the usual big budgets, big-name online stores, global sales, and without any Premier League football stars, GLITCH turned the industry upside down and created a completely new relationship between brand and consumer.