Whenever a new fashion collection drops, brands will do everything they can to keep the black market of resellers and bootleggers out. But when Alexander Wang’s flipped the legendary adidas trefoil upside down for his collaboration with adidas Originals, we realized that doing things completely wrong sometimes is the right thing to do.

The collection inspired an equally subversive launch campaign. Instead of seeing the black market as a threat, we adopted their tactics as a blueprint for our launch campaign.

As opposed to selling the clothes in stores, consumers had to track a pop-up truck and buy the clothes straight out of trash bags. We staged a black market in the face of the fashion establishment during the industry most important moment: New York Fashion Week.

We made the black market the centerpiece of fashion’s biggest stage: New York Fashion Week.

Two weeks before the event, we began teasing the collaboration with cryptic clues around the city, including posters that revealed confidential legal information behind the partnership.

Then we hijacked Alexander Wang’s runway show with a film that made sense of all the previous clues. Models stormed the catwalk by surprise, debuting the collection. But the public couldn’t just buy the collection in any store. They had to call an ambiguous phone number for a pre-recorded message with times and locations.

Crowds lined up for hours not knowing what to expect. In each location, a truck showed up for an hour, selling the collection out of trash bags, staging a black market in the face of fashion’s establishment. We then brought the trucks to huge crowds in both Tokyo and Japan.

In a market flooded with new exclusive collaborations every day, the adidas Originals and Alexander Wang collection is considered the most effective collaboration launch in adidas Originals history.

The launch earned over 3 billion media impressions globally, with zero paid media. Coverage was featured in over 150 key international media titles, from Fast Company to Vogue. It generated 131 million impressions on Twitter and 2 million Instagram engagements, with zero paid social media. And the first collection sold out on the first day in New York, Japan, and Tokyo, with zero retail stores.

The brand that invented collaborations as a way to enhance its own heritage, reinvented them as a way to challenge it.