Kickers Drove Over 15,000 WhatsApp Opt-ins in Under Three Months
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Kickers is a heritage footwear brand with two very different customers living side by side on one website. The school range is the engine of the direct-to-consumer business and where most of its trade comes from. Alongside it sits an adult fashion customer, drawn by the classics and by collaborations with fashion labels, who has no interest in school shoes at all. In the UK, Kickers is run by Pentland Brands, the London-based family business behind Speedo, Berghaus and Mitre.
Kickers Needed a Channel Beyond Email Before Its Biggest Trading Period
As Senior CRM Manager at Pentland Brands, Sophie Wright oversees CRM across a portfolio of seven brands. Kickers was performing well. The question was how to scale communication with customers without leaning on email alone.
"The majority of our communication goes through email across the portfolio," Sophie explains. SMS was live in some markets, but in EMEA it is expensive. Sophie wanted Kickers to be an early adopter of WhatsApp, and to test it during a key trading period rather than a quiet one.
That test sat inside a wider strategy. "WhatsApp was never about adding another standalone marketing channel," says Bao Dao, Director of CRM at Pentland Brands. "The strategy is to build a connected CRM ecosystem where email, SMS and WhatsApp each play the right role in the consumer journey."
For Kickers that period was back to school, when parents are shopping, comparing and asking questions. It is also when the brand's segmentation problem bites hardest. "There are very specific fashion consumers that don't care about school and don't want to hear about it," Sophie says, "I don't want to be sending them black school shoes."
Her one hesitation was resourcing. "We are a very lean team," she says. People across the business assumed WhatsApp meant a traditional two-way channel with someone at the other end. "My hesitancy was around the lack of education on how it actually works. It is two-way communication, but not in the traditional sense."
Aparna Kumari, CRM Executive at Pentland Brands, had run WhatsApp marketing before and knew why it could work. "I will not read my SMS or my emails, but I will check my WhatsApp daily," she says. "Hearing from one of my favourite brands within my WhatsApp inbox is more personal."
An Opt-in Engine, a Welcome Journey That Segments, and an AI Agent That Serves
Kickers went live on Merx in June, while Pentland was in the middle of migrating seven Shopify sites and moving its CRM to Ometria. "Integration-wise, the team made it really easy and knew where they needed to go," Sophie says.
A programme built across the business. The results came from bringing the wider Pentland team together. CRM planning shaped the journeys and the campaign calendar, CRM tech connected WhatsApp to Shopify and Ometria, Customer Service Ops provided everything needed to train the AI agent and then tested it hard, Brand kept every message true to the Kickers voice for both adult and school shoppers, and the leadership team backed launching a new channel for Kickers.
Opt-ins from every touchpoint. On-site pop-ups offering a welcome discount were tweaked during the pilot to increase visibility. The organic social team pushed awareness, the paid social team ran acquisition across Meta, and email told the existing base about the new channel, "which was very positive on Kickers".
Every one of those opt-ins is a customer who has chosen to hear from Kickers on WhatsApp, and for Aparna that clear consent is what makes the channel work. "Once a customer has given you consent, that means that they are interested and they want to hear from you," she says.
A welcome journey that does the segmentation up front. Every new subscriber is asked about their interests, so the team knows from the first message whether it is speaking to an adult or a school shopper, along with birthdays and other details. "That enabled us to tailor specific comms during the three months and beyond, whether it was back to school, adult, or promotions," Sophie says. From there, automated journeys run in the background: order confirmation, birthday, second purchase and repurchase triggers.
An AI agent for the questions parents actually ask. Back to school was never going to be a pure marketing play. "Those comms would have still gone via email," Sophie says. The difference was on the service side. Trained on the Kickers catalogue and knowledge base, the AI agent handles where's my order, help with orders, promotions and product recommendations, "what's the best shoe for me, what's the best shoe for my kid". When it reaches the limit of what it can help with, it hands over to the customer service team rather than looping. "That was a big factor across all the teams that touched this," Sophie says. "A lot of team members at Pentland really put it to the test at the beginning, and I think that enabled it to do well."
Integrated with the stack Pentland already runs. Merx connects to Shopify to handle codes and orders, and an integration with Ometria lets the team decide which journeys each customer gets: a mix of email and WhatsApp, or WhatsApp alone. Running the channel takes Sophie's team a couple of hours a week, and when something needs attention, Merx responds within a couple of hours.
Results Across the Pilot and Later Rollout
Kickers built its WhatsApp audience through back to school. These results cover the early pilot and later rollout:
- 15,000+ WhatsApp opt-ins in under three months
- 13% order conversion from 18 June to 16 August
- 4 live automated triggers as of 28 September
- >119,000 customer attributes captured from 18 June to 16 August
Then back to school arrived. "Kickers has just skyrocketed, in line with our trading period," Sophie says.
Aparna recalled sending 15 WhatsApp messages over roughly three months, alongside the automated triggers. "Getting such a huge revenue from such a small number of communications has surprised me a lot," says Aparna. Lottie Bishop, Technical CRM Manager, saw the same when comparing channels: "Against email, it's much bigger. Overall the metrics and what it brought back as a channel was surprising, definitely more than I thought it would be."
Kickers can now tailor its messages to adult fashion and school shoppers separately. "Being able to keep building that out and make sure we're communicating the right thing to the right person is really important."
Engagement rates look similar to email. The difference is what happens next. "They can be served within that second, or if they have a question, it can be answered, which obviously doesn't happen with an email." More than 90% of customer queries are handled and resolved inside the WhatsApp conversation, and the customer service team now reviews Merx's conversational insights every Monday before writing up trade notes. "It's helped identify themes much quicker, around changes in our delivery across brands and whether things should be relooked at," Sophie says. "They find it extremely helpful."
For Bao, the numbers are only part of the story. "The ROI is important, but the bigger opportunity is what WhatsApp gives us beyond incremental revenue," Bao says. "It's the richer first-party data, and a more immediate relationship with our consumer. That is the most strategically interesting aspect for the wider Pentland portfolio."
Kickers is now the proof point for that connected approach. "Kickers has proven a strong example of what that can look like when the channel, data and customer experience work together," Bao says.
The results have travelled well beyond the CRM team. "Based on initial performance that was strong, people were keen and excited to get it up and running as a new channel," Lottie says. Aparna says: "WhatsApp has been the biggest shout in the last quarter, as the new channel that we onboarded. With such great numbers, it deserves its space in the town hall."
The next test is the Q4 peak. "I'm excited to see how it fares during Q4 peak and whether we can continue the momentum," Sophie says. "Is this purely a seasonal play? I don't think it is." Beyond Kickers, she sees a place for WhatsApp across the rest of the Pentland portfolio, launched brand by brand at the right moment. Asked whether she would recommend Merx to other CRM teams: "I would."
