9 January 2012

Miista: cheaper with a tweet

I love shoes. And I love a shoe bargain. So when I read about Miista's Cheaper with a Tweet campaign, it sounded too good to be true. I'd never heard of Miista before this campaign - you can read about them here. They have a slightly Jeffrey Campbell-esque vibe to them: tough styling (buckles, zips, hardware, chunky heels, dark colours) and very 'blogger'.

Cheaper with a Tweet kind of did what it said on the tin: you tweeted about one of their shoes and that shoe came down in price. By how much depended on your Klout score (though goodness knows those things seem to fluctuate willy nilly for no discernible reason). So, in theory, the more socially influential you are, the more you have the ability to lower the price by. The more people that tweet about a style, the cheaper it gradually gets and you can jump in and buy at any point. So far, so social media friendly and story worthy and I've seen it talked about on loads of sites in the last few days.


It all begins to get a wee bit lengthy here:


Initially, as I touched upon, I thought that the premise might be too good to be true. Turns out it wasn't and I got their £175 Andee boot for a quid. Yup, £1. One pound. Including delivery. I fully expected them not to turn up or for the sale to be cancelled but the boots arrived today! Here they are on some fake grass. Why? Why not people, why not?


I'm dead excited it worked so well for me, the boots look good, feel quality and, added bonus, they fit too!

But how did the campaign work? I'd have though something with such a great hook would go viral very quickly (especially on Twitter) and that the shoes would all be slashed in price and snapped up! But, five days after I ordered there are still shoes sitting there, some with barely any tweets against them, which suggests the Twitter response maybe wasn't as hoped. That could be lack of brand recognition or maybe the tweets didn't clearly enough outline the idea. That said, the fact that loads of sites picked up the story and the fact that I'm sitting writing about it now suggests it has value as a story. Though that may be down to the fact that I follow a bunch of folk who report on stuff like this, increasing the likelihood of me hearing about it, in comparison to your average Twitter user and fashion lover. I'd be curious to hear what you think!

It looks like Miista are planning to utilise the Blogosphere going forward which feels like a pretty nice move. This came in my shoe box.


I might give it a bash...you've got til the 13th to bag your bargain.