With over 58.8 million active users globally, many of whom are under 16, gaming platform Roblox became a viable venture for Australian retailer The Athlete's Foot as the brand gears up for the back to school season.
In conversation with Ragtrader, The Athlete's Foot GM Ian Taunton discusses the reasons for launching a new game called Fitopia on Roblox:
What led to the launch of Fitopia on Roblox?
Back to School - which is the period we're in now - is our key trading period for The Athlete's Foot. We've always done a great job in finding ways to engage our parents, but we set ourselves a challenge to really connect with the children who are the end wearers of the shoes that are bought during back to school. So, we were looking for an innovative, engaging way to talk to the end wearer of the shoes, in a way that connects them to the brand and the time of year.
What were the key steps involved in launching the game?
After landing on the concept of Roblox, we worked really closely with our digital agency LeapFrogger to build and develop the Fitopia world. We then had to go through a process of really engaging our fit proposition - that The Athlete's Foot is all about providing a great fitting shoe for our customers.
So that fitting proposition and our back to school messaging brought to life in the design of the Roblox world was critical, as well as the future development of having a platform which is expandable and allows for future development for different opportunities in the future.
Something that is engaging for the consumer - not something that's forced upon them by their parents - but in some ways they're already connected to in their day-to-day lives and bringing our environment to that. Once we got that build and development done, it was about how to bring it to life, through execution and marketing, to the marketplace.
Were there any challenges?
Being the first retailer in the country to get on board with a Roblox gaming environment, there's going to be different challenges and development nuances that are put in front of us. But overall, the execution has been as seamless as you could expect. It evolved very quickly and came to life on time, on budget, and it was a really seamless execution from our side.
Were there any interesting insights?
It's interesting that 70% of the Roblox users are under 16, which is a great alignment with The Athlete's Foot. The way that the lobbies work between developing a single lobby versus developing a world, which is the process that The Athlete's Foot has gone down, where you can make that into an expandable platform.
We've got four different worlds within Fitopia at the moment, we can expand that into a fifth world or sixth world to support different events and themes throughout the year.
Are there any plans or ideas of new worlds to launch?
We haven't got robust plans around it, but we think there's some real opportunities around different categories; the football category and having a football world, the netball category and having a netball world. We have a community relationship with parkrun in Australia and New Zealand, so we could even develop a parkrun world. We might also find different suppliers from our third-party brands who may want to partner with us as well on some different worlds.
Do you have any other community-based initiatives or campaigns?
The Athlete's Foot has had a really strong partnership with parkrun for the last three years. We're really happy to have re-signed that in the last couple of months before Christmas. We're now engaged with parkrun for the next three years. It allows us to connect with a really wide cross section of the population who enjoy being active outdoors - whether they're walking or running. That is very aligned to our target market - whether being kids or adults - in that fit, active lifestyle space.
We have a NETFIT relationship, which is an active netball fitness program that we support and partner with. We generally like to align ourselves with organisations that align to a healthy, active lifestyle.
We've also been partnering over the last couple of years with ASGA, who are part of our shoe recycling program, where customers drop their old shoes into bins in The Athlete's Foot. ASGA then take that recycled product and turn it into different forms of soft play fill for playgrounds and schools and parks etc.
Do you have anything else to share about Fitopia?
We've had a really good challenge to get the kids into the stores, and in good fitting school shoes. And having the Roblox game and the avatar, and the code that you can only get from The Athlete's Foot stores which can unlock secret levels in the Fitopia world, has been something that we've been really proud of.
It's bringing that physical retail environment and connecting that with the virtual environment for the kids. That's something that we've been really passionate about trying to do, and we're really happy with the way that that started to roll out in the last few weeks.