Blade Badminton Shoes Ad BTS<br/> — Behind the Scenes

Cinematographers and Directors checking a shot angle — Antony Algrin and Anandu Vinod - Cinematographers and Sayyid - Director checking a camera shot angle.

Hundred is a brand comprising sports enthusiasts and car nerds. It’s not an exaggeration to show how big of a brand we are but a statement for our audience to know where we come from. We come from the world of sports; of fans who want to meet their childhood heroes.

As a brand, we need to set a standard and come up with products that envision our goals - to promote a community nurturing sportsmen and sportswomen of the future. As you and I go through the journey depicted in this blog - our product designers are relentlessly working towards coming up with newer shoes, rackets, apparel, and accessories that can help you level up. Here is the story of Blade.

Blade was designed as a badminton shoe with a 30% softer midsole for better comfort. However, when Blade was launched, we already had an arsenal of shoes that were comfortable Thus, marketing Blade became a greater challenge than we expected.

We needed to market it as a product which is similar to all our other products in terms of comfort, yet better. Because as a matter of fact, a 30% softer midsole means you will land on your feet while keeping your balance.

What was supposed to be just another campaign for another product, ended up being an epiphany for the entire team. We researched a few avenues as to how to market this product without sidelining everything and ended up relating it to a common problem Indians and Asians face every day - overall comfortable-performance shoes.

The marketing team for Blade had to now market these badminton shoes to the non-badminton audience which can benefit from it. For context, many doctors, nurses, and senior community members face the imminent danger of developing plantar fascitis because of their occupation and age-related issues. Similar was the case for daily commuters.

The epiphany we had dictated us into marketing Blade as a badminton shoe, but also a type of shoe that meant extra comfort for this strata of audience. Therefore, with the primary focus being shared between marketing Blade as a badminton shoe and as a shoe for all while showcasing the level of superior comfort it provided without sidelining our other shoes became a huge task.

We needed to come up with something that solidified Blade’s stance in the market as a premier badminton shoe - while touting it to the audience that desperately needed these shoes for comfort. For this to happen, our audience had to be able to relate to this shoe’s comfort prowess on and off the badminton court.

The best way to do that was to draw parallels between what we deem comfortable and what activities give us the most amount of comfort. Something that helps people unwind or generates an idea of comfort in their subconscious. And the amount of comfort these shoes can provide on the badminton court.

Hence, this ad was conceptualized.

Concept of the Ad

The concept of the ad was the tagline of the Blade shoes - Redefine Your Comfort Zone. So, we involved actors of two different age groups to portray the same.

The idea was to link the feeling one gets when they are extra comfortable to when they wear the Blade shoes. To show this extra comfortable feeling, we took scenarios such as:

The feeling of sipping tea in a lush garden
The feeling of taking a nice long bath in a ceramic bathtub
The feeling of “switching off” your alarm clock and going back to sleep
Listening to music

These were the scenarios all of us can relate to when we talk of comfort. Thus, the concept of the ad was to draw parallels between the same. The majority of Hundred’s shoes are manufactured with comfort and performance in mind. Therefore, to showcase Blade as something different, we needed to push through our comfort zones to redefine some others.

The Locations:

The ad was shot at two locations. A luxurious AirBnB on the outskirts of Bangalore and a local badminton court.

Time and Effort

The time and effort put into this ad was immense. To showcase the idea that wearing and moving in the Blade badminton shoes is as comfortable as the ideas of comfort in the human mind, the ad took over 20 hours over a span of 2 days with countless retakes to make it perfect.