Account Management / Almighty / New Balance / NB Minimus Launch
The challenge: In 2010, New Balance approached Almighty to help them launch NB Minimus - a line of shoes aimed at the growing numbers of minimalist runners, who, up until that point, largely were considered fringe and wore Vibram Five Fingers. Our response was high-quality feature content and serious community engagement that helped launch Minimus as New Balance’s surprise success of 2011 in ways that far exceeded any of our expectations — and set the groundwork for the kind of engagement the brand very much aspired to within this vocal and frequently-outspoken group of serious runners.
So in 2012, when they wanted to repeat this triumph with the zero-drop Minimus Zero, they approached us again.
Our approach: From the commentary on the first launch, we knew that New Balance had a captive, vocal audience of people - both Minimus fans and critics. We mined comment threads from previous articles and Facebook posts in search of feedback on the design and construction of the first Minimus shoes. I lead a team which reached out to the commenters, sent them pre-release pairs of Minimus Zero, and put them on the phone with New Balance designers and ultramarathon champion Anton Krupicka, to share their observations. The resulting content, called Minimus Zero Conversations, represents the discussion at the heart of this community, and the conversations we facilitated helped launch this next generation of Minimus shoes to the world.
Results: Our efforts resulted in one of the most-successful product line launches in New Balance history, launched initially with only a minimal paid media investment; the most-read and most-commented pages on newbalance.com; sold-out shoes at running speciality retailers around the country; a product platform that was successfully rolled out beyond running and into other categories, and a big win with an influential group of customers.
My role:
- Account management
- Strategy
- Project management
- Quality assurance
The team:
- Ian Fitzpatrick: Partner/Research
- RJ Evans: Partner/Design Director
- Jeff Wilder: Director of Technology
- Lucia Corso: Editoral Content
Screenshot of one of the Minimus Zero Conversations (no longer live on newbalance.com)