Shoes of Prey

Shoes of Prey is a website born out of the internet’s ability to conveniently provide total customization to users. The Australian based site allows you to design the ‘perfect shoe,’ you can choose heel size, material, colour, bow’s, straps, closed or open toe – choices are near endless with more designs being continually added.

Shoes of Prey has been around for awhile, but now the company is starting to gain momentum and their incredible success in the recent week can be traced back to a 16 year old video blogger, YouTuber Juicystar07 aka Blair Fowler.

In the video, which has had over 490,000 views and more than 94,000 comments, Blair asks viewers to visit the site, design a pair of shoes and then write about the shoes they’ve designed and the event they’d wear them to. That is an incredible traffic driver, considering each visitor had the intention to design a shoe and engage with the brand. Their experience is far more likely to have a lasting impact because of the time spent interacting with the website.

According to Michael Fox (director and operations founder for Shoes of Prey) the video was the 5th most viewed and the most commented video worldwide last Wednesday. It was the 58th most viewed and 2nd mot discussed worldwide for the whole of last week.

The provided screen shot of their traffic provided by Google Analytics speaks for itself:

Unfortunately, as I initially suspected, conversion rates were low. Shoes of Prey is not a cheap option for shoes and particularly inherent in buying shoes online is the risk that they won’t fit comfortably (if at all). Juicystar07′s audience primarily consists of girls aged 13 – 17 who are unlikely to have the cash to burn on expensive custom made shoes. Although in my view that’s not to say that strong engagement with the Shoes of Prey now won’t pay off in the future.

A little closer to home, Tee Twyford of NZGirl and TVNZ Breakfast’s Gadget Girl did a piece on Shoes of Prey. Shoes of Prey attribute more of their recent sales to the Breakfast segment stating that “traditional media is far from dead.”

NZ Girl is also running a competition asking their readers to design a shoe, and upload it to the NZ Girl Facebook page, offering the user-designed shoe as a prize to one lucky entrant. The competition is very much the same as Juicystar07′s and it would be interesting to find out if the competition run with NZ Girl achieved a greater conversion rate than that ran with Juicystar07.

YouTube has granted almost anyone the ability to grab a hold of an audience and drive them to engage with their personal brands, and other brands and products. In this case one YouTuber drove more traffic than 5 months of traditional media coverage – and that’s saying something!

Well done to Shoes of Prey for experimenting!

Story facts and images credited to 22 Michaels.