Consumers have 13 days left to create their own Monolo Blahniks in partnership with Neiman Marcus, but unless you read the NM Daily or keep up with the industry trades, this is an opportunity that could have easily slipped past unnoticed.
Neiman Marcus announced their temporary bespoke option almost a week ago on their blog, but except for a few hundred organic shares on Facebook and Twitter, the momentum on this offering is mostly lost. What’s missing? Manolo and Neiman are crippling themselves with a lack of digital digital integration.
As the opportunity exists today, the only way to embark on a bespoke journey with Neiman and Manolo is to call the Neiman Marcus ladies shoe salon in Dallas and speak to a representative. Customers order their dream shoes for prices between $2,500 and $6,000 and in three to six months they arrive ready to wear.
From a retail standpoint this is brilliant, but as bespoke offerings become more common brands need to start thinking about how to build these opportunities into their digital presence to build buzz and engagement.
The intricate detail of Manolos don’t render it fit for a NikeID online styling experience, but bespoke opportunities are still perfect fodder for digital spread. Videos or posts about the creation of the shoes or a gallery of work that shows the shoes along their three month journey could have bult momentum around the specialized experience while engaging consumers.
Instead Neiman Marcus wrote about the opportunity in a blog post that was shared on Facebook 725 times. This seems to indicate that the social platform is a perfect place to cultivate the discussion of bespoke. To Neiman Marcus’ credit, they did post the opportunity on their Facebook newsfeed. Still, something more in line with Louis Vutton’s Mon Monogram may have taken them further.
For almost everyone in the industry this approach to brand translation online is still new and unfamiliar. The companies that navigate this paradigm shift though, will ultimately win in a changing landscape where the long tail of the web is shrinking and social networks dominate.