Building an Exclusive Summer Brand Experience to Drive Product Demand and Community Engagement
Brand: Lane Boots
Campaign: Smokeshow Social Club
Timeline: June 21 - August 1, 2025
Role: Creative Director & Strategy
Responsibilities: Campaign Strategy, Creative Direction, Storytelling, Influencer Marketing, Content Strategy, Website Experience
Executive Summary
Summer is traditionally one of Lane Boots' slower sales periods, creating a challenge to maintain momentum between seasonal campaigns.
Rather than relying solely on promotional messaging, I developed the Smokeshow Social Club—a lifestyle-driven campaign designed to make customers feel like they were joining an exclusive community rather than simply purchasing a pair of boots.
The campaign combined influencer experiences, original content creation, paid media, user engagement, and a custom gift-with-purchase into a cohesive brand experience that increased Smokeshow collection sales, expanded customer acquisition, and generated a library of evergreen creative assets for future campaigns.
The Challenge
The Smokeshow collection had strong product appeal but lacked a defining campaign that differentiated it from other western boot collections.
The objective was to increase Smokeshow sales during one of the year's slower retail periods while maintaining efficient customer acquisition.
The campaign needed to:
Increase demand for the Smokeshow collection.
Introduce new customers to the Lane Boots brand.
Re-engage existing customers.
Produce high-quality creative assets efficiently.
Strengthen Lane's lifestyle positioning beyond product-focused advertising.
The Insight
Customers don't aspire to join a product collection.
They aspire to join a community.
Instead of marketing the Smokeshow as another boot collection, we created a lifestyle around it—one that felt fun, social, aspirational, and distinctly summer.
The Smokeshow Social Club wasn't simply a campaign.
It became an invitation.
Campaign Strategy
The campaign brought together experiential marketing, influencer partnerships, social engagement, and performance marketing into a unified customer experience.
Influencer Experience
Hosted an intimate "Boots & Burgers" event at Easy Slider with a curated group of lifestyle influencers.
Rather than treating influencers solely as content creators, we designed an authentic social experience that generated organic storytelling while strengthening relationships with the brand.
Content Production
To maximize production efficiency, the influencer event doubled as the campaign photoshoot.
Influencers became campaign talent, allowing us to:
Produce authentic lifestyle imagery.
Capture short-form video content.
Generate social-first creative assets.
Reduce production costs by combining two initiatives into one.
The resulting content library supported paid advertising, email marketing, website merchandising, and organic social long after the campaign concluded.
Gift With Purchase
Created a custom Smokeshow Social Club trucker hat available exclusively with qualifying purchases.
The gift reinforced the campaign's exclusive identity while providing customers with an additional incentive to complete their purchase.
Community Engagement
Introduced a direct messaging initiative encouraging customers to contact Lane Boots for personalized boot recommendations.
This humanized the shopping experience while reducing purchase hesitation and creating opportunities for one-to-one engagement.
Paid Media
Creative focused less on product specifications and more on the feeling of belonging to the Smokeshow Social Club.
Campaign assets combined:
Lifestyle photography
Short-form video
Product storytelling
Community-driven messaging
Influencer content
Performance Highlights
Paid Media
Compared to other campaigns running during the same period:
While average order value and ROAS trailed higher-priced collections, the campaign achieved a lower cost per acquisition, indicating stronger purchase intent among shoppers who reached the website.
Collection Growth
The Smokeshow collection experienced:
21% increase in orders Period over Period
141% increase in orders Year over Year
Although the Lexington campaign generated stronger advertising efficiency, the Smokeshow campaign produced greater collection-specific sales growth, demonstrating the effectiveness of focused storytelling for a smaller product line.
Customer Growth
Period over Period:
New customers increased 10%
Returning customers increased 54%
Year over Year:
New customers increased 42%
Returning customers increased 53%
Organic Social
Campaign engagement increased across owned channels, including:
Instagram interactions increased 38%
Strong customer participation around campaign creative
Increased influencer-generated content
Performance also reinforced an important creative insight: video consistently outperformed static imagery for engagement.
Site Performance
Unlike the Lexington campaign, Smokeshow utilized an enhanced collection page rather than a dedicated landing page.
This streamlined approach maintained strong conversion performance while requiring significantly less production effort.
Additional campaign outcomes included:
Total site sales increased 11%
Total orders increased 28%
Gift-with-purchase nearly doubled add-to-cart rate
Site conversion rate increased approximately 5% through purchase incentives
Key Learnings
The Smokeshow Social Club reinforced several strategic insights that shaped future Lane Boots campaigns.
Community sells products.
Building an aspirational lifestyle around the product proved more effective than focusing solely on product features.
Customers responded to the feeling of belonging as much as the boots themselves.
Experiences create content.
Designing the influencer event as both an activation and a production day dramatically increased creative efficiency while generating authentic assets across multiple marketing channels.
Video remains the strongest performer.
Although static photography delivered solid results, short-form video consistently generated stronger engagement and advertising performance.
Future campaigns shifted toward a video-first content strategy.
Incentives influence conversion.
The exclusive trucker hat gift-with-purchase significantly increased add-to-cart behavior and overall conversion, validating promotional merchandise as an effective purchase catalyst.
Impact
The Smokeshow Social Club transformed a seasonal product campaign into a branded customer experience that blended lifestyle marketing, influencer engagement, and performance advertising.
The campaign successfully:
Increased Smokeshow sales during a traditionally slower retail period.
Grew both new and returning customer acquisition.
Improved advertising efficiency.
Generated a reusable library of creative assets.
Validated influencer-led production as a scalable content strategy.
Established best practices around promotional incentives and video-first creative.
More importantly, the campaign demonstrated that successful product marketing extends beyond showcasing merchandise—it creates experiences customers want to be part of. By positioning the Smokeshow collection as an exclusive summer community rather than simply another product line, we strengthened customer engagement while delivering measurable business results.