Pubs are at the heart of Irish culture. But in the past few years, over 450 have closed.

Last winter, with the forecast showing increasingly disruptive and adverse weather conditions, we anticipated many people would opt to stay at home during the colder months.

Since Guinness has a long history of supporting local pub culture, we wanted to step in and help inspire people to brave the outdoors and visit their nearest pub for a pint of Guinness.

Inspired by our iconic liquid and pint, we created Guinness Foot Pints. Guinness Foot Pints are a pair of black and white snow boots that, with every step taken, leave imprints of the Guinness pint shape into the snow. Our Foot Pints showed up wherever it snowed, marking a path of pints in front of pubs, for others to follow in pursuit of a pint of Guinness.

With more people opting to stay at home, we wanted to create a head snap moment that’d get people talking and inspire them to get down to their local pub. It needed to be bold, disruptive and launched in a way that would get everyone talking and thinking about Guinness.

We knew we had a huge community of Guinness fans on social, who love to play with our pint. There are thousands of posts documenting the weird and wonderful places they’ve spotted a likeness to our iconic black and white pint. So, to fuel this culture and get the community talking, we gave them a new and unexpected icon to play with.

We designed and manufactured our Foot Pints boots and took them wherever there was snow in Ireland and Great Britain. Using the Foot Pints boots, we left a trail of Guinness pints on the snowy streets outside of pubs, leading up to its doors and welcoming people in.

We then invited people to pre-register for a pair of the Foot Pints boots, by dropping a promo film on Instagram that linked to the Guinness store.

Over 8 million people watched the drop of the Foot Pints promo on Instagram, many desperate to get their hands on a pair. Immediately after, almost 20,000 signed up to pre-register their interest for the boots, which will be made available to purchase later this year. A third of all sign-ups were from hot countries that don’t even get snow, which goes to show the strength (and sometimes irrational) love for the brand.

Visits to the Guinness online store were up 20% and the rush of activity to Guinness.com caused the website to crash.

The comments section of the film has become a discussion ground for updates. Hundreds used it as a place to tag others and make arrangements to go to the pub… while wearing Foot Pints of course. It’s the first time a pair of boots has made anyone thirsty.