Vans at Warped Tour
It’s another successful product launch! Recently Vans has embarked on the wonderful journey of launching their new shoe, the ComfyCush Era. It’s a brand-new innovation that transforms one of Van’s most iconic and classic silhouettes, with their latest consumer-driven comfort technology. By leveraging the brand’s more than 50 years of heritage and design experience, and employing in-depth consumer feedback, the ComfyCush Era perfectly merges classic styling and modern comfort technology without sacrificing one for the other.
As part of their larger campaign, Vans wanted a fun way to promote the ComfyCush Era at music festivals, namely Warped Tour. Their team decided that for their marquee music festival, they wanted to give fans the unique experience of doing a stage dive. Only this time, instead of landing on thousands of adoring fans, these music fans would dive into a foam pit made inside a shipping container.
We knew safety would be a priority with this kind of programming, so we set to work figuring out the best way to accomplish their functional and aesthetic goals while ensuring that everyone would be able to have a safe and fun experience.
When you approach the 20’ x 8’ container, the first thing you notice is the bright teal, matched from Van’s campaign colors, and their large spot graphic used for branding. Although this container was purpose-built, their team wanted to keep the raw feel of a shipping container, so we enclosed the steel structure in corrugated siding.
To access the stage dive experience, attendees must first climb the custom staircase, fabricated in our shop, and wait for their turn on the platform, lined with slip-resistant flooring. The main event, the dive pit, was filled with foam blocks (which we have on great authority are very comfy). As part of the experience, guests’ photos were taken during the stage dive by a camera mounted to railings around the pit. As background for the photographs, Vans used printed SEG Systems fabric panels to replicate the feeling of taking a stage dive into a crowd of rowdy fans. Finally, to exit the foam pit, divers would slide down a fire pole to view their photograph on a huge screen, adjacent to the container.
For the brand ambassadors, we included a back of house cleverly placed under the foam pit’s platform. On the opposite side, we installed a computer kiosk powered by a 100-amp panel to collect the photographs and display them on the large screen.
At their first even, Boston Calling, Vans had an awesome location on the main thoroughfare. That amazing placement combined with their large presence meant that their activation always had a line full of participants. Over the three-day event, 3,000 people signed up for the stage dive experience. Once again Vans impressed with their fun spirit and spot-on branding. Our team was dazzled (but not surprised) by Vans’ ability to inspire an extraordinary level of engagement from their fans at music festivals. We’re so proud to be part of this tour and can’t wait to see how the Vans structure is received during the final weeks of Warped Tour!
