Footasylum are a national streetwear and sportswear retailer, focussed predominantly on the youth and urban demographic. They integrate with their consumers through industry leading creative, exclusive product, and artists relevant to their audience.
Footayslum’s YouTube channel has been the main focus of their strategic shift from just a streetwear retailer to an entertainment brand – producing YouTube series true to the platform not as a selling tool, but as a genuine digital broadcaster.
Since taking over management of the YouTube Channel and implementing a new, entertainment-first approach, Simon Lloyd (Partnerships Manager) and Joe Sammells (Creative Writing Manager) have increased subscriber growth by 2,980% (from 6,000 to 185,000) – in the process creating the channel’s first 3 million-viewed videos. At the time of writing, Footasylum’s channel has over 24million views, and has been watched for 135 million minutes (256 years). Over the course of 12 months the channel has developed the most engaged audience across all of Footasylum’s social channels, attracting funding from global sportwear brands PUMA and adidas.
Howard Tattersall – Head of Marketing at Footasylum says:
‘A key pillar of the wider company’s marketing strategy is to build a community, and we believe that by creating for the audience’s entertainment, rather than for short-term commercial gain, we’re creating brand advocates who are engaging with Footasylum more frequently across multiple touchpoints. We’re delighted with the subscriber growth – performance is exceeding expectations at this early stage.’
Footasylum achieved this success by studying the platform and creating YouTube series their core audience want to engage with: challenge based, comedic videos featuring talent they’re already invested in. Leveraging their sponsorship of Britain’s biggest YouTuber (KSI) last year, Footasylum used KSI’s audience as a springboard to get eyes on their channel.
Wednesday 28th September saw the launch of dating show Does the Shoe Fit? Season 2. The channel’s most successful series to date, the first episode saw 460k views in the first 36 hours, making it the highest performing video in this period in the channel’s history.
Footasylum will continue to build on this momentum with brand new original series premiering between now and Christmas, when they’ll begin to test strategies for off-platform advertising and commercial tie-ins.
