Tuesday Shoesday: Miista Cheaper with a Tweet

My affair with Miista shoes has been well documented throughout this blog; it was true love at first sight. My affection for them has grown and I now own two pairs of Miista badboys - my treasured, well-worn birthday Luanne boots, but also my new Hildas. It may surprise you to hear the latter pair cost a mere £1. Yes, ONE POUND. Let me give you a moment to pick your jaw up off the ground.





This was made possible by the "Cheaper with a Tweet" campaign, which ran from the 3rd to the 13th of January. Put simply, you tweeted a link from a special button on the Miista site, which then decreased the price of the shoes you tweeted about - the percentage depended upon your Klout score. The actual campaign has been dissected and discussed by many who are much more marketing- and social media-savvy than I - in fact you can hear the ins and outs of it from the agency which coordinated the whole thing, RAAK. What I do know is that within one day the site had crashed due to sheer volume of visitors, within a week nearly every shoe from the site had sold out (unless you're a size UK3.. in which case, what were you waiting for?!) and the whole of Twitter was abuzz with the campaign. Even Paloma Faith got involved, decreasing the cost of the Hera Black by 17%.

I spoke to Chloe Dinga, branding and marketing guru at Miista, who said that although they were initally very nervous about the campaign - mainly due to its complexity - it was a huge success. "We did have to make some tweaks after the first day, the response was even more than we expected and we had some difficulty with the site crashing from all the traffic", said Chloe. Once the site was fixed, the Miista team then made sure everyone participating was only allowed one tweet, and to be able to buy one pair of shoes. Had they not done this, "everything would have been gone within a day!"

The gorgeous Daisy Kate of Fashion Stereotype wears her £1 Hildas

The ultimate goal was to get the Miista name out there, and to involve the entire fashion community - especially bloggers, as Chloe states that "more and more [trends are] being set by bloggers instead of magazines and other established elements of the industry". I picked some numbers up from the RAAK report: unique visitors to the site increased more than ten times over the course of the campaign, with 62% visiting for the first time. That's a big bunch of new Miista fans.

I'm told by Chloe that the SS12 collection will be available for purchase online "at the end of next week". Until then, feast your eyes on the lookbook preview pictures, shot by Saga Sig in Iceland, who has also worked with Topshop, Dazed & Confused, and i-D online. If you squint hard, you can just about see the shoes in the last picture, but this little taster seriously whet my appetite for the SS12 drop!