Bethany Biron/Business Insider
Adidas wanted its visitors to play games - and buy sneakers.
- Adidas is experimenting with the Instagram-friendly, ephemeral pop-up model in an effort to sell sneakers while also gaining social media traction.
- The retailer launched a one-night-only "performance enhancement playground" for visitors to test the Adidas Ultraboost shoe while participating in activities like navigating a maze, riding a seesaw, and competing in a vertical jump test.
- The venue is optimized for Instagramming potential, painted in bright colors and with delineated photo spots and hashtags emblazoned on the ground.
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Though violent outbursts prevented Adidas from dropping its much-anticipated Arizona Iced Tea collaborative sneaker on Thursday, elsewhere in New York City the retailer was in the throes of building a very different type of shopping experience: an interactive adult playground.
With a few hours to go before the Adidas Boost Experience was slated to open its doors to the public, we stopped in to try our hand at challenges that included navigating a maze filled with hundreds of bright yellow balls, riding a seesaw for the first time in two decades, and leaping as high as we could in a vertical jumping test.
Each activity at the one-day-only Boost Experience serves as a component of a three-part installation "designed to boost your brain, creativity, and future," according to Adidas. It's also undoubtedly developed to be an Instagram hot spot, rife with opportunities for bloggers and iPhone-wielding shoppers to post photos filled with Adidas logos to their feeds.
Read more: Chaos and violence erupted when hundreds of people showed up to get 99-cent sneakers from Adidas and Arizona Iced Tea - see what happened
Much like Macy's used the ephemeral pop-up concept when it launched Story, Adidas is now taking a cue from Instagram-friendly experiences like the Museum of Ice Cream and Rosé Mansion to sell shoes. For brands like Adidas, the power lays more so in the social content that derived from these fleeting events, and less from the actual sales generated from them.
"The idea is we can show up and provide this experience in a really important market, but also let it live and extend out to places like the Midwest and to all those people who aren't able to get to New York," Wes Petticrew, trade marketing manager at Adidas, told Business Insider.
This is what it was like inside the Adidas Boost Experience: