Vans - Foot the Bill

When COVID hit, we realized pretty quickly that there was an important part of our cultural ecosystem that was going to be hit hard: skate shops. Serving as hubs of the skate community, many of these mom & pop businesses were already living month to month, abandoned by Nike's push towards DTC, and without an online retail presence of their own. As stay at home orders rolled out, the future looked bleak. Vans kicked off a program called Foot the Bill, where each shop was able to design their own custom shoe to sell on Vans' .com, advertise it on their own channels, and take home 100% of the profits to help keep their businesses afloat. This did a number of things well, it drove traffic to our customs site, as consumers tended to buy more than just the shops' shoes that had come for, it recruited the shops to be brand advocates, it garnered a lot of local news coverage, because the world was hungry for feel good stories and each shop was part of a community, and most importantly, we gave two million dollars to struggling skate shops, music venues, art galleries, and restaurants, allowing them to stay in business through the first, most difficult months of COVID.