More Than a Moccasin

In-store marketing for men’s shoes was once an oxymoron—there was no in-store marketing done in this huge category. Retailers arranged various left-footed shoes on a sales table and then (are you ready for this?) put the price sticker on the arch of each sole.

“The men’s casual department was just a sea of brown shoes,” admits L.L. Bean shoe buyer Natalie Messier. That is until a small company named H.S. Trask appeared in 1994. With shoes made from buffalo and elk hides, the goods were the antithesis of the calfskin loafers with paper-thin soles from Gucci and Ferragamo. Most importantly, its marketing worked like gangbusters with consumers.

Harrison S. Trask was a veteran of the footwear business who loved the outdoors. While fly fishing in Montana’s Madison River in 1993, he spotted bison on the opposite bank and commenced to wondering why he never saw shoes made from buffalo leather. Research revealed that there were hundreds of bison ranches across the U.S., most marketing the animal’s low-fat meat, but demand was low for its hide. Figuring that a couple millennia of Plains Indians couldn’t be wrong, Trask set out to change that.

“I talked to a fellow in the leather business, and at first he said he didn’t even know if anyone tanned bison hides,” Trask recalled. “But he found a firm selling tanned bison hide and we found it was a terrific leather.”

But he put more than soft-yet-strong hides into the shoes. “A lot of our competitors were taking things out of their shoes to be lower priced,” says Tom Konecki, the company’s current president. Trask, however, short-changed no feature, touting “cushion orthotics, soft midsoles, high-grade outsoles and fully lined vamps.”

But the company shared a challenge with manufacturers as diverse as Jaguar automobiles and Häagen Daz ice cream: how to sell an upscale product, made of expensive materials, at a premium price?

Trask had a story to tell consumers that would help it sell against footwear based pure fashion or pure price. In addition to comfort and durability, the company was selling heritage, the old-west heritage of bison leather.

Retail sales personnel had to be Trask’s front-line storytellers. His team sought to create iconic P-O-P materials that would give them a talking point for the brand. They devised a statue of a bison cast in bronze mounted on a massive walnut and marble base that proclaimed “H. S. Trask, Bozeman, Montana.”

These statues are simply beautiful. The Trask statues are heavy enough to break a foot, and cost around $500 each—they are most definitely not your usual “paper on a stick” P-O-P.

“I’ve seen customers go up and just stare at the bison statue in our stores,” Messier notes. “[Trask] says a lot with their P-O-P without saying a word.”

Maybe it’s because most American boys of a certain age grew up playing cowboys and Native Americans…but there’s something about a bison effigy that seems to draw men’s attention across a crowded store. Of course, while the customer pauses to ogle Trask’s P-O-P, the well-versed sales associate stalks his prey, preparing to swoop in for the kill: “Did you know these shoes are made from real bison leather? Go ahead and pick one up.”

“Trask tested the bison statues at L.L. Bean’s flagship store in Freeport, ME, tracking sales both before they were added to the display and after. “We got a substantial and measurable increase in sales,” Konecki recalls. “Interestingly, our sales only dropped a little when we removed the statue from the display, because by that time the sale associates had been educated and were still able to sell our heritage successfully.”

For some shoemakers, that might be the end of the story. Trask, however, continues to grow its brand and add P-O-P. For example, when it launched a new line of shoes with a nautical look, it created a three-foot wood-strip canoe display. (The number of men who romanticize about canoe trips, without ever having set foot in a real canoe, is directly proportional to the number of people who own four-wheel drive vehicles, but have never driven off-road.) The canoe displays, costing about $200 each, were a huge hit at retail, as was the new line of shoes.

A brand extension into travel-oriented shoes begat yet another iconic P-O-P: a scale model of a DeHavilland Beaver float plane, considered by many to be the official taxi of Alaska. (Those with long memories might recall similar P-O-P from the Canadian Mist liquor brand, another product that relied heavily on a woodsy motif to market. The Canadian Mist piece, however, was made out of plastic and hung from the ceiling, while Trask’s was made of wood; it also would have retailed for close to $200.)

“I can’t think of a men’s shoe brand that communicates its uniqueness so effectively,” Messier observes.

The latest addition to the H.S. Trask brand is a line of shoes made out of elk hide. Unlike deerskin, which picks up stains from even the oils on our hands, elk is softer than any other leather and yet is harder to cut, so it lasts longer. No surprise: these new products will be introduced with a statue of a fully antlered elk.

Are men drawn inexorably to images of large horny animals? Believe it! “The elk shoes retail at $15 more per pair than the bison shoes, and $25 more than steer leather and have done extraordinarily well so far,” Konecki says.

“I’ve always been fascinated with marketing and what it takes to sell something,” enthuses Trask, “To me the genius of marketing is in creating something so special that price is irrelevant.”

IN HIS OWN IMAGE

When Harrison Trask started the firm that bears his name, he wanted to “sell shoes to guys that like the same things I do.” He correctly guessed that the “casual Friday” dress code of the mid-90s would segue to the full-time “casual weeks” of today.

“Nobody was making shoes for guys wearing khakis and button-down shirts,” he says. “That was my niche.”

There were three key concepts Trask built his marketing around: 1. L.L. Bean and its “Maine Outdoorsman” design was the model for his mail-order catalogs. Trask sold a lifestyle as much as footwear. He also realized that his brand’s image and quality were inextricably linked.

2. He identified icons of the Old West—cowboys, Indians and buffalo—and used them as his brand’s own icons, while making the style contemporary.

3. From catalogs to line launches, Trask used a coherent theme. Catalogs were shot using backgrounds of the great lodges of the Old West, or in one notable instance, exhibits from the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum in Cody, WY.

“I wanted to make the company look like it had a heritage of a 100-year-old business,” Trask says.

Rod Taylor is senior VP-sales promotion and sports marketing, for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati, OH. He can be reached at [email protected].