‘How people are shopping today’: Why Shoe Palace is doing more multi-brand marketing campaigns

Digital Marketing Redux // June 1, 2026 ‘How people are shopping today’: Why Shoe Palace is doing more multi-brand marketing campaigns By Julia Waldow Shoe Palace To keep up with young consumers, Shoe Palace is increasingly spotlighting multiple brands in its marketing campaigns.

The retailer’s latest example, a campaign called “Dispatched for Spring,” launched in April across social media and in-store displays. The hero video shows six Shoe Palace trucks; each opens to reveal models wearing brightly-colored merchandise from a specific brand: either Nike, Jordan, Adidas, New Balance, Asics or On.

Featured products include On’s Cloudnova 2 ($170) and Asics’ Gel Cumulus 16 Midnight ($140). “Dispatched for Spring” is part of a newer marketing direction for Shoe Palace, which, for years, worked with brands like Nike on individual campaigns.

In late 2024, though, the company began featuring various brands in the same campaign to “really reflect how people are shopping today,” said Robert Brack, Shoe Palace’s svp of product, marketing and brand strategy.

Shoe Palace’s shoppers — three-quarters of whom are under the age of 28 — have “less loyalty to one logo,” Brack said, and the company is adjusting its marketing playbook to better reflect that.

“The old-school model was [that] the brand delivers the campaign and messaging, and the retailer speaks to that and delivers that experience through their lens,” Brack told Modern Retail. “But, that’s not the way the customer is connecting and shopping today. … Consumers don’t live in one brand silo. So, the marketing can’t live there, either.”

Founded in 1993 as a single store in California, Shoe Palace has grown into a multi-state footwear and apparel retailer, with nearly 250 locations across the U. S. It carries dozens of brands, including Anta, Converse, Crocs, Puma and Hoka, as well as Shoe Palace-exclusive merchandise.

Shoe Palace has a diverse customer base, with nearly half (48%) of customers identifying as Hispanic, nearly a quarter (23%) identifying as African American, and more than a tenth (13%) identifying as Asian American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

In 2020, the British sportswear giant JD Sports Fashion Plc (also called JD Group) paid $325 million to acquire Shoe Palace’s U. S. business. In May 2026, JD Group announced that North America — home to Shoe Palace — is now its No. 1 region in terms of sales and profit. For fiscal 2026, JD Group reported a 10.

5% increase in year-over-year revenue, totaling £12. 662 billion. JD Group did not break out revenue for Shoe Palace. Shoe Palace has run multi-brand campaigns three other times in the last two years: for holiday ’24, back-to-school ’25 and holiday ’25.

However, “Dispatched for Spring” is the first time Shoe Palace has grouped multiple brands together during a non-tentpole event. As Shoe Palace has more of a lifestyle consumer, the new campaign is centered around SKUs that are driving business at its stores, like Adidas’ Samba Jane ($100) and Nike Air Force 1 ’07 ($125).

The most successful multi-brand campaigns are ones that focus more on vignettes, moods or outfit inspiration, Brack explained. “The younger customer is very savvy, so they’ve already discovered a lot of these items,” he said.

“I think it’s just connecting the dots of, ‘Hey, this is a cool [piece],’ or, ‘This is an expression I hadn’t looked at of how I could put this [outfit] together.'” Even the models in the new “Dispatched for Spring” campaign are wearing pieces that other shoppers may have in their own closets at home.

In this way, the messaging is more subtle, as opposed to overtly saying, “Come to Shoe Palace,” Brack said. Still, these multi-brand campaigns are generating strong returns for Shoe Palace, Brack said. “Engagement is significantly higher when we do these brand executions,” he said.

The company shared that stores featuring last year’s back-to-school campaign — which included window displays and LED screens — saw a 10-12% lift in foot traffic and a double-digit increase in basket size, compared with non-campaign locations.

“Dispatched for Spring,” meanwhile, has delivered some of the brand’s strongest video performance to date, the company told Modern Retail. Shoe Palace’s newer marketing approach mirrors broader trends in the sneaker industry, said Jessica Ramírez, co-founder of the retail consultancy The Consumer Collective.

“For a good number of decades, you either had Adidas or you had Nike,” she told Modern Retail. “Now, there are all these challenger brands. … The consumer is definitely more about, ‘Who’s got the coolest vers