VIRTUE 01 training footwear

Slowly but steadily making my way through the photo edits. First batch of laterals…





One more for Bruce Lee and The Bride

Looks clean. Nice colorways, Jeff!

R

Color is often the unsung hero in footwear. I used to say to my team it doesn’t matter how innovative or cool a shoe is, if people don’t want a red shoe, they are not going to buy it. The color people I’ve worked with in footwear often seemed so far more advanced in terms of trend research and predicting color adoption than folks I’ve worked with in other industries. I was always surprised more of them were not picked up by automotive, CE, and furniture companies. Maybe the nature of those categories being more conservative just doesn’t make them as relevant as they are in performance footwear and apparel.

Sorry, a little OT :slight_smile: … also, good color strategy with making the upper the big hit and keeping the tooled parts neutral.

Just be sure to order by qty 60% black, 30% grey and 10% everything else. :wink:

I joke. But kinda. All for hero loss leader colorways though.

R

yup, too true. I’m guilty of it as well as a consumer… “oh look at this!!! ok, cool, comes in white white…”

Thanks for the kind words. It has definitely been a nightmare attempting to balance fun, cool, modern, and commercial all in 4-6 colorways, but I’m pretty happy with them as a launch collection that’s representative of the brand as a whole.

Starting to populate the website and the brand’s Instagram. Kickstarter video shoot is next on the docket.

Found the first sketch from this project today. Like any designer I’ve had all kinds of ideas over the years that have never come to fruition for one reason or another, usually self-doubt. For whatever reason, this time around all it took was a little doodle to make me think, “Yeah. I could do this.”

And on dot graph sketchbook paper! :slight_smile:

Haha. Dots are my default for notebooks. Just enough to keep things orderly, not so obtrusive they can’t be sketched over.

Me too, I’m a dot grid kind of dude. :slight_smile:

After a feverish couple of weeks of filming, editing, voiceover, and copywriting I submitted to Kickstarter last night. Pending approval things will go live next Tuesday, October 22.

Congrats on getting it all done! Looking forward to checking out the Kickstarter link!

Thanks, yo. Project approved this morning. Going live next Tuesday, October 22 at 8am Pacific.
Kickstarter Preview (and campaign after launch): THE 01 from VIRTUE Athletic / Functional. Fitness. Footwear. by VIRTUE Athletic — Kickstarter
YouTube version of the Kickstarter pitch video: THE 01 from VIRTUE Athletic / Functional. Fitness. Footwear. - YouTube

And it’s officially live on Kickstarter! Thanks to everyone here for the support leading up to launch.
https://kickstarter.com/projects/virtueathletic/the-01-from-virtue-athletic-functional-fitness-footwear

Project update: Just over one week in the project is nearly 90% funded. My number one media target come through on the second day of the campaign (perfect timing), and I’m hoping that a couple more social media and media hits this week will push it over the edge.

Request for help from the community: I have a very modest advertising budget left, and I feel like I’m completely fumbling my way through Facebook and Instagram ads. When you launch a campaign you get literally dozens of emails from those semi-scammy crowdfunding marketing houses, and after some fairly detailed talks with a couple I still didn’t trust them. Running the numbers on the percentage of your campaign you ultimately owe them it just wasn’t a financial risk I was willing to take. So my request is this: Does anyone out there have an individual or agency they recommend for quick-turn help with properly targeting ads throughout the rest of the campaign? I would really appreciate any advice here. It’s the part of the process I know the least about. Thanks for the help

Congrats on getting everything up and running and the progress so far! From what I’ve seen following on IG, looks great!

I don’t have experience running a Kickstarter campaign, but did look into it quite deeply with a start-up I was working with. From what I remember those marketing agency do take a hefty cut, but either way, even if self directed it is normal in the industry that there’s a huge spend on ads and promotion for every dollar “earned”. At the time we ran some numbers that showed we’d need something like $130,000 spend to get a $300,000 raise. Expenses included everything from agency fees, CC fees, ads, mailing list acquisition costs, platform costs, etc. This was not including actual production costs of any assets, ads, etc. Including all that content productions, samples, etc. we were looking at spending $235K to raise $300K and this is all before actual PO and production costs.

We spoke to a lot of agencies big and small the takeaway always seemed to be you need to spend a lot to bring a lot. Those dreams of raising $1MM with only a render and video are not realistic as you never hear how much is spent to advertise and promote the campaign.

That all being said, I did always get a bad feeling from all the marketing companies promising the world.

Since you are so close, I would just recommend making a bigger push yourself through IG ads or FB ads, working on seeing what is most effective and constantly tweaking. I’ve run a few ads myself on both IG and FB and don’t really have metrics to compare to, but was able to get pretty good results just running a few simultaneously with different creative and seeing what works + looking at other brand ads and following their lead for ideas of calls to action, etc.

Good luck!

R

Thanks, R. I feel the same way. When I ran the numbers after already reaching $40k on my own (which a marketing agency wouldn’t be able to touch) I would have had to hit something like $125-150k with their help to walk away with same amount of money as about $70k on my own…and they’re able to bail on the project at any point and still take their cut.

My own ads have been moderately successful, but the Facebook system is not the most helpful. Bare-bones FAQ pages, no phone support, robot automated email support a full day after sending a request…For instance all of my ads stopped delivering for two days because you can’t A/B test different sized audiences within the same campaign if the audiences overlap. There was absolutely no indication of that anywhere in the system as I was building the ads. It’s just things like that I’m trying to avoid.

ya, FB, IG, Google, etc. are not great at being intuitive or providing support. It’s pretty frustrating.

R

As of 6:45 am this morning the project has been successfully funded. The campaign still has over two weeks to go, but for now I am tired and taking a few hours off to regather my thoughts and prepare for the challenges (which are half the fun) ahead. Thanks to the Core community for the support over the past few months, weeks, and days.

Cheers.