June 14, 2018

Smartrac helps creating superior experiences for adidas SPEEDFACTORY

Smartrac has teamed up with adidas to offer personalized products with embedded NFC tags, which are tickets to superior consumer experiences.

adidas is revolutionizing the world of footwear creation with its SPEEDFACTORY, where it produces high-performance and eventually tailored products such as the running shoe series adidas Made For (AM4), which feature NFC tags that provide enhanced dialogue with consumers as integral element of the digital consumer engagement solution.

A part of the story: Smartrac’s NFC solutions
The ability to create personalized products and superior digital experiences for consumers is certainly what could be called the common denominator between adidas’ SPEEDFACTORY concept and its ‘Smartrac powered’ NFC-related activities. Right from the start, the SPEEDFACTORIES were equipped with Smartrac devices for automatically matching a certain individual product with an NFC tag carrying a certain ID. The first products to be delivered from the SPEEDFACTORY on a large scale are the adidas Made For (AM4) shoes. This footwear series comprises six individually designed and manufactured shoes for the cities of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Shanghai.

adidas SPEEDFACTORY

For these pioneer products, Smartrac and its partner Blue Bite created a bespoke digital experience. When tapping an NFC-enabled phone on the Circus™ Flex NFC tag embedded in the shoe, the consumer is personally invited to review the footwear, and take part in a raffle to win a customized shoe manufactured in the adidas SPEEDFACTORY. The raffles related to all AM4 shoes are geofenced for locations pre-defined by adidas. Everyone entitled to take part is then invited to configure individual details of the shoes they are trying to win. Their consumer feedback is then utilized to help the product team in improving future footwear.

Yet, that AM4-specific experience is not the first that Smartrac has created in the context of SPEEDFACTORY: adidas’ NFC technology partner also enabled the specific consumer experience related to the adidas Futurecraft M.F.G. (Made for Germany), the first shoe produced at the SPEEDFACTORY pilot factory in 2016.

SPEEDFACTORY + NFC = superior consumer experience
“As adidas’ partner for NFC solutions, we are very excited about the SPEEDFACTORY project,” said Christian Uhl, CEO at Smartrac. “adidas can continue to count on us to provide advanced NFC technology to whatever products it produces in its cutting-edge SPEEDFACTORY facilities and beyond. Ultimately, both the manufacturing concept and our innovative solutions aim to provide consumers with a superior digital experience.”

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