- E-commerce company Zappos will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year with a variety of partnerships and promotions, including exclusive shoe drops from its brand partners—Brooks, Crocs, Steve Madden, and Birkenstock—as well as year-long promotions and sales and in-person activations.
- As part of the grand 25th birthday celebration, Zappos is excited to announce a series of exclusive shoe drops from top brand partners to be released throughout the year, such as Brooks, Crocs, Steve Madden, Birkenstock, New Balance, UGG, and more – furthering its commitment to delivering styles for every shoe aficionado
- The brand will also partner with celebrity cake artist and winner of the “Is It Cake” game show, Liz Marek, to create a spin-off of the game, “Cake or Kicks,” that will refashion 10 of the 12 exclusive shoes as cakes. The content will be featured on Zappos’ social media
Consider: Zappos was founded around the same time as Pets.com, and only one of those two companies survived. The company was around before the smartphone, Candy Crush and even TikTok, and over the course of that quarter-century became known for its customer service and shipping and return policies, eventually leading to an acquisition by Amazon (which, no doubt, contributed to its longevity).
No doubt, as a pioneering e-commerce company, 25 years is a reason to celebrate, and Zappos is taking the entire year to acknowledge the milestone, said Zappos’ chief marketing officer Joe Cano (who was recently a Brand Innovators CMO of the Week). “1999 was a much different year than now. It’s an exciting time to celebrate all the wins our customers have given us and our brands have given us since the beginning.”
For consumers, the celebrations will involve exclusive shoe drops, from partners including Birkenstocks, New Balance, UGG and others, as well as bi-weekly sales and other deals. The company will showcase those exclusive collections via a content partnership with “Is It Cake” star Liz Maret to create realistic baked versions of some of the shoes. The brand will try to fool consumers by showing these cakes on its social media channels in a series called, “Cake or Kicks.”
“We love to look at fun moments that people gravitate towards,” Cano said. “Our customers are fun and quirky, and they love these little stunts. This is another fun way to show how we don’t take ourselves too seriously here.”
For the company’s partners and associates, Zappos will stage an event in its hometown of Las Vegas in the fall. “Our actual birthday is in July, but if you’ve ever been to Las Vegas in July, it’s a little hot, so we are going to do it around one of our other main events,” Cano said.
As the company reflects on the 25 years that came before, Zappos is now looking to the future. Just as the company became known for its legendary customer service and its free shipping and free returns for one-year policies, the question is where the next innovations will be. Cano guessed they would be technological.
“AI has been the buzzword of the past year,” Cano said. “How do we use that to serve our customers, but also how do we use that to facilitate the human connection with our customers? We want to make sure there’s humans behind the chatbots and human concierges available at all times for our customers.”
