Living in Portland, OR, its hard to miss the food trucks. Me, being a shoe person, I started to think, "what about a shoe truck?" I searched for current shoe trucks and found a few mainly in New York and California that host fashion shopping parties and provide a service to your location. To stand out against traditional shoe stores, I wanted to have a mobile store that would draw the attention of shopper to buy shoes. The challenge was how to get the crowd to come to the truck and make a purchase over going to a traditional shoe store. I knew I had to offer products that they could not get at their traditional shoe store for starters.
After studying in Europe for a semester, I discovered shoe brands that are not distributed in the U.S. These European brands could co-sign their end of the season or surplus shoes to the shoe truck as a way to introduce their products to the U.S. market. For the shoe truck to be mobile with inventory, the truck would have to evolve into a bus. To include a shopping and customer fitting area, the bus would have to grow into a double decker bus for additional space. This type of vehicle works well with the business concept because double deckers are known to be European and are not a familiar vehicle in the U.S.
To play off of the playful atmosphere of Portland and to show more then a foreign double decker bus on the streets, I wanted to do a vehicle mashup with a german Volkswagen van to be more iconic with a European/Portland flare. This would help draw curb appeal but there still needed to be a demand to shop at the shoe bus. I decided to make the locations unknown with the help of guerrilla marketing.
The use of social media would announce what new products had arrived from Europe to gain awareness and demand. Social media announcements would be sent out when the bus engine had started and details about its pop-up location to purchase the goods. The target audience would be fashion mavens, footwear insiders and enthusiastic social media users that could follow the shoe bus. By offering products that are typically not distributed to the U.S. and using social media about inventory and location would create a buzz in the community to shop and buy shoes at the Shoe Bus, "Better catch the bus."
