BE THE
EXCEPTION —
New Balance didn’t need to outrun the “dad shoe” label—it needed to own it. In 2017, as the “Dad’s Look” surged from bloggers to the streets, we named the behavior and flipped the stigma into a stance. Using custom AI, we taught a system to understand fashion and launched an interactive out-of-home experience at New York Fashion Week that — instead of treands — spotted uniqueness.
The system scanned 17,000+ looks across our installations and live feeds, scoring originality against a trained fashion dataset. Each “exception” triggered a real-time spotlight (on-site OOH callouts, creator handoffs, rapid editorial clips) so the rarity became the story. Reactive social, and tier-one fashion coverage—driving 87.5M earned impressions and shifting New Balance from punchline to proof point.
