Every Friday afternoon, Muslims are obligated to attend a sermon and prayer session which generally lasts around 1–2 hours. As footwear is forbidden inside mosques, many people chose to wear sandals for the convenience of taking them off before entering.

However, most mosques have no storage for footwear, so the only option is for people to leave their sandals at the entrance. But with the huge numbers of people attending the sermons, there will undoubtedly be a sea of sandals every Friday.

Nine out of 10 Muslims have experienced losing their sandals while visiting a mosque, either mistakenly swapped or taken by other people. This causes a sense of unease while praying, as people worry about their sandals outside.

Therefore, Lenovo introduced GPSandals – Anti-loss footwear with a tracking device that gives Muslims peace of mind during their Friday prayer.

The first phase was treated as a soft launch. The objective was to test the GPSandals and monitor reactions from the audiences seeing the product for the first time.

With Indonesia being one of the top five global users of social media, Lenovo sent several pairs of GPSandals to Muslim influencers and key opinion leaders to review and hopefully generate hype around the product.

Lenovo also approached mosque caretakers, who regularly deal visitors who have lost their footwear. Whilst gathering the caretakers’ opinons of the product, Lenovo provided GPSandals to those who were interested in being agents for the technology. Those selected would introduce the product to Muslims who had lost sandals at their mosque.

From this beta phase, Lenovo managed to garner extremely positive responses and sentiments from the Indonesian public, receiving thousands of requests for the official release of GPSandal.

The GPSandals created hype in digital space, becoming the #2 most talked about topic on social media during the soft launch. The initiative created 410,000 social media impressions with earned media value of Rp 100 million.

Most importantly, Lenovo located itself in modern culture, and resonated with everyday Indonesians.