Adidas and Urban Outfitters are partnering up to drive sales of their new collaboration through an email campaign that combines links to purchase with street-style images.

Email subscribers of Urban Outfitters are receiving newsletters regarding its collaboration with the athletic brand while the retailer is tapping into popular social influencers to help shape the campaign into a culturally relevant push. The emails bring users to a mobilized lookbook with social media integration in which you can shop the look.

“Adidas’ ‘We The Future’ campaign represents one more evolution in the brand’s re-emergence as a focal point of culture, fashion, and commerce,” said James McNally, senior manager of business development at Prolific Interactive, Brooklyn, NY. “Since its initial Kanye West collaboration in 2015, adidas has achieved the seemingly impossible by giving Nike a legitimate run for its money as the dominant force in the sport-influenced fashion lifestyle space.

“Adidas has executed its marketing and product strategy flawlessly, collaborating with leading designers, maintaining a connection with youth culture at the street level, and exemplary social media,” he said. “The Urban Outfitters collaboration shows this strategy coming full circle; adidas has brought together a carefully-curated set of personalities, and by leveraging the mainstream-accessible Urban Outfitters distribution channels, made that curated experience available to the masses.”

Urban marketing
Urban Outfitters is launching a holistic mobile campaign that focuses on creating direct methods to purchase to drive sales for the new collection. The We The Future campaign was created in partnership with creative cultural influencers who have significant followings on social media.

Social influencers are sharing organic content and images on social media platforms such as Instagram to drive awareness for the campaign. The images of the new collection featured on Urban Outfitter’s dedicated page include the hashtag of each influencer.

An email campaign has been launched to tap into the most active Urban Outfitters customers, that features captivating images of the campaign.

Users can click to view the lookbook in its entirety on mobile and desktop. The lookbook features a “shop the look” section in the gallery in which users can purchase items shown in the images.

The campaign’s mobile-optimized emails also showcase a map feature that pinpoints the nearest Urban Outfitters retail store to the user, based on his or her location. Users are also able to seamlessly continue to the retailer’s social media profiles by clicking on each app’s icon.

Adidas and Urban mobile sales
Both Urban Outfitters and adidas have leveraged mobile and social to drive respective sales, with the We The Future campaign as their latest project.

Urban Outfitters was among the first retailers to leverage 3D Touch for the iPhone 6S, enabling users to quickly access content such as product details while pointing to the ongoing streamlining of mobile shopping (see more).

Also, adidas drove pre-orders for its limited-edition sneakers with its Confirmed mobile application, the footwear sector’s first app designed to offer consumers the ability to reserve the shoes from their smartphone thanks to geo-targeting technology (see more).

“Adidas’ challenge is to balance authentic artistic and streetstyle relevance with mass distribution, which is always a challenge for brands,” Mr. McNally said. “The Urban Outfitters campaign is unique because it allows adidas to leverage its cultural and social expertise in gathering leading influencers, while offloading some of the risk of mass market distribution on Urban Outfitters.”