Nike x Corteiz

The freshest kid on the block.

The streetwear equivalent of the irresistible force and the immovable object? Not quite perhaps, but it’s not far off. Corteiz are without doubt the freshest kid on the block right now, and in 2023 they announced perhaps the most unexpected collaboration with global giants, Nike.

Unexpected because 24 months ago, Corteiz were forced to pay damages to Nike after a court ruled their name was too close to Nike’s iconic Cortez silhouette. Thankfully for the rest of us, the two have put their differences aside and moved from the courtrooms to a collab, releasing three colourways of a limited edition Air Max ‘95.

Masters of marketing, Corteiz created chaos with a campaign that had hordes of fans sprinting through the streets of New York and Paris, eager to grab a pair of the elusive kicks. Enlisting football superstars Phil Foden and Eduardo Camavinga for a crossbar challenge giveaway is testament to the brand’s popularity, so needless to say the hype for this drop was real.

Already having a relationship with Nike after facilitating their previous drops with Patta, the European head of partnerships reached out to us for technical support on the Corteiz collab.

With our previous work on collabs between Patta & Nike, and Patta & Tommy Hilfiger, we’ve become Europe’s (un)official high-volume drop partner. Keep reading for insights into how we helped make Nike x Corteiz a success. 

High‑volume drop specialists.

High-volume drops ultimately boil down to one key challenge: keeping the bots at bay. Bots are softwares designed to flood high-volume drops and buy as many of the available products as possible. These are then resold at auction later for hugely inflated prices.

It’s estimated that reselling special edition sneakers in this way is a market worth a staggering $36 billion a year.

With that in mind, Nike enlisted us to help prevent their Corteiz collab from falling into the wrong hands. Shopify’s in-built bot protection is right up there with the best, and we already had plenty of experience implementing it on our previous drop projects.

With some top secret technical know-how, we implemented Shopify’s tool to stop the bots and give the sneaker heads the best chance of getting their hands on a pair of the coveted kicks.

Besides the bot protection, Corteiz wanted help with staggering the drop into three sections: a first release for friends and family, an early release for loyal customers and a final general release.

We achieved this by using metafields to distinguish the customers into three separate groups. Each group was sent a password at a different time, and the password unlocked the webpage from which you could purchase the shoes.

The plan worked seamlessly and every colourway drop went off without a hitch. Below we’ll take you through some of the results.

Shopify rules the world. 

Watching the numbers unfold in real time on Shopify was quite incredible. 100.000 live visitors, with over 50.000 active carts. The entire collection of each colourway sold out in a matter of minutes. The store performed excellently, without any hiccup, and it was all built natively on Shopify.

The entire drop was orchestrated by the Shopify platform and its inhouse tools. The front-end was a simple Shopify theme. The password communication was handled through Shopify email. The automation took place in Shopify flow. The personalised experience was coded in Shopify script. And the bots were prevented by Shopify’s own bot protection software.

The whole drop was brilliant evidence that with an exceptional product, exceptional community-focused values and a little technical know-how, you can achieve everything imaginable natively on Shopify.

Corteiz like to tell everyone it's them, but really in ecommerce it’s Shopify that Rules The World.