If the shoe fits, then social media is your Great Saviour

It is a truth universally acknowledged that chicks like shoes. It’s also a universal truth that chicks hate turning up to an event only to find someone else is wearing exactly the same thing – be it dress, shoes, or attitude. (It’s even worse if people keep asking you if you both dressed alike on purpose. That was OK in primary school, not so good in the real world.)

An Aussie online retailer has come up with the goods to solve part of your sartorial problem. Website Shoes of Prey is an e-tail offering by entrepreneur Michael Fox, who recently won an award for innovative online retailer of the year.

Shoes of Prey is a simple offering – choose your shoe type, your colours, fabric, heel height and so on – and they’ll make them and deliver them to your door.

In the interests of journalistic research, I jumped on the site and attempted to design the ugliest shoes possible. (I think I cracked it, too – check out the snapshots at the bottom of this page. One’s the classic “shootie”, which is the mullet of shoes, and the other is … beyond explanation.) The shoe offering on the site is actually far from ugly.

It’s a competitive market, however. (Custom shoes, not ugly shoes.) Out there on Te Interweb, there’s everything from dirty stripper heels to punk-your-chucks offerings.

Mr Fox adopted an aggressive marketing tactic. He opted for that Great Saviour of marketing: social media.

They approached a popular video blogger in the US – 16-year-old Blair Fowler, who has cultivated a mass following of teen girls around the world.

She reviewed their products and the video ended up fifth most popular worldwide on YouTube on the day it launched.

Watch the video and read more about the success stats here (and also check out her groovalicious polka-dot lamp set).

Great, nuhh? Not so much. The ever-so-popular video didn’t result in sales.

Seems teen girls love the custom shoe idea but don’t have a couple of hundy to drop on a pair at will.

"Tee Twyford of NZGirl did a piece on us on one of the popular morning TV shows in New Zealand last week and we've actually had more sales from that, so traditional media is far from dead," Mr Fox (right) wrote.

He tweaked the functionality of the Shoes of Prey website, enabling customers who wanted to buy the shoes but didn’t have the dosh to share their loves with others via Facebook et al.

He’s been pretty honest about the failure of the original approach (see link above), but is sticking with social media long-term and is now reporting healthy sales figures.

Check out some of the Shoes of Prey links at the bottom of the post for more goodies.

Getting to the point, Mr Fox is set to appear at the next Social Media Junction event in November at Auckland’s SkyCity.

The theme is “achieving ROI in your social media marketing strategy” and it’ll feature six international speakers.

The keynote speaker will be US marketing blogger Lee Odden, of toprankblog.com, who advises many Fortune 500 companies on how they can get the most from their digital marketing activities.

Other speakers are British online marketing expert Simon Wakeman and LinkedIn regional vice president Cliff Rosenberg.

SMJ will also showcase Kiwi brands from Hell Pizza to Tui, ASB and Telecom.

Hop to the SMJ website for more or use the Old-Fashioned Telephone (09 306 4012) or the New Fangled Electronic Mail, register@socialmediajunction.co.nz.

Shoes of Prey on Facebook

Shoes of Prey on Twitter

Shoes of Prey on YouTube

And an excellent article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the rise of DIY fashion, featuring Mr and Mrs Fox.

Lastly, as promised, massively excellent fugly shoe action: