Skate culture doesn’t live on big branded e-commerce sites, it lives and breathes in skate parks and small independent stores. Those small stores are in danger of dying out as more and more customers choose the convenience of purchasing online.

However taking on too much product can kill a skate store. You have mall and online stores, readily available, with free shipping and free returns. Small stores struggle to compete.

Our challenge was to help skate shops give their customers the product range and delivery experience they expected, while also helping Nike to quickly meet these demands and maintain market share.

Partnering with a final mile delivery service called Darkstore, we designed and built an experience that allowed independent skateboard shops in LA to create their own digital storefront and populate it with a bespoke Nike inventory.

Customers could then purchase the items in-store and get them delivered within the hour to the store, or to a skatepark nearby.

This new model works for the skaters, the skateshop and Nike.

It enhances the skaters’ experience of learning about, enjoying and purchasing products in-store, and online, while better connecting with their local community.

It increases the skate shops ability ?to leverage and personalize the Nike product range and reduces the impact of stock management and forecasting.

For Nike, it broadens and empowers the brands relationship with shops and their ability to respond to local needs, based on greater levels of data ?and insight.

We identified key consumer behaviours during a detailed but fast research and strategy phase. This also included technical discovery, research into new distribution methods and business models, and the data, insight and planning to inform the best cities to kick off the programme.

During our research we uncovered some alarming statistics that confirmed our approach. Including the fact that skate store staff spent 10-20% of their day managing the store's limited stock. Resulting in at least 1-2 missed sales due to no stock moments a day. When customers ordered their items at that point, they typically had to wait over a week for the product to be delivered to the store.

We settled on fourteen skate shops in Los Angeles and designed and built the end to end experience including supporting marketing material.

Central to the experience was an app for each retailer, in their own branding. It is built in a way that allows Nike to quickly roll the product and experience out to new shops, and quickly scale, helping the retailer serve the customer, support their sales needs, and support Nike’s business objectives.

This app allows the retailer to present considerably more of the Nike SB catalogue and inventory to the customer in a fast and convenient way.

The customers can then order the sneakers they want in store, there and then.

No more stock issues, resulting in more happy customers.

Our work opened up entirely new experiences and locations for Nike and the participating retailers. We helped a global business to innovate within the confines of a traditional retail model and think differently about how they can support their customers, as well as the end consumer.

During our month long trial with the fourteen skate shops we communicated a 2 hour delivery time, but aimed for 90 minutes. In reality the average delivery time was 40 minutes or less.

The pilot saw a 17% sales increase in Nike SB sales in the 14 stores.

We are now planning to scale this entire experience to other cities and other shops, while also looking at ways to enable geo-located drops for events.

All to help Nike to continually serve and support the grassroots skating scene.