schuh “Sell Your Soles” Campaign

The Brief

Protecting the health of our planet is one of IPOS’s core values.
So when our long-term client, footwear retailer schuh, invited us to help them drive the impact that their ‘Sell your soles’ sustainability campaign had on their customers across multiple stores, we were excited to take on the challenge.

The central idea for the campaign is that customers are asked to donate their unwanted shoes and receive a £5 voucher to spend on their next pair in return. All donated shoes are collected from store, categorised and either cleaned for resale in various outlets or broken down for remanufacture. The revenue generated from this activity is donated to the Word Land Trust who plant and care for new trees across the world.

The Outcome

The project was a huge success resulting in the donation of many pairs of shoes (over 1000 units during the first installation) and the planting of trees in Borneo, Brazil, Ecuador and Kenya (in partnership with the World Land Trust and their Plant A Tree programme) together with the increased awareness of schuh as an environmentally conscious retailer. IPOS also had the foresight to create the installations in a way that would allow them to be reused in the stores multiple times when the areas became vacant, again saving time, money and resources.

The Process

The IPOS studio jumped straight to work and quickly realised an opportunity to elevate the existing campaign imagery by placing more focus on the unwanted shoes, which all had their own backstory. The use of considered product styling and utilising the in-house photography set-up, based at our head office, a series of beautiful product portraits were created, ready to push the campaign to the next level.

The creative direction that IPOS provided to schuh helped them realise the strength of the using the donated shoes combined with live plants as a visual metaphor for ecological vitality and growth. This was enhanced by the juxtaposition of the organic material with the clean and somewhat futurist store aesthetic . Care was taken to ensure that the attention grabbing display utilised organic materials, environmentally friendly inks and preserved plants that can be used time and time again.