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

“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 version?’ or ‘Who’s got the most efficient sneaker?’ … The consumer isn’t necessarily loyal to one brand today, so the wholesaler shouldn’t be loyal to just one brand today.”

In fact, wholesalers have lost out when they’ve bet too much on one brand, Ramírez emphasized. Foot Locker, for instance, was long dependent on Nike, having purchased 75% of its merchandise from the brand in 2020. But, in 2022, Foot Locker found its sales stumbling after Nike pulled back from various retail partners to focus more on direct-to-consumer. Nike has since started selling more products to Foot Locker, under a larger wholesale focus.

For a retailer like Shoe Palace, there are challenges in putting multiple billion-dollar brands into one campaign, Brack said. In general, brand partners “want to own the full frame, so it’s their product, their talent, their messaging,” Brack said. “Internally, there’s some pushback about: Does this dilute the brand message?” he added. “[But] when we’ve done [a campaign] correctly, it doesn’t weaken the brands — it strengthens the environment around them.”

This doesn’t mean all of Shoe Palace’s campaigns will be multi-brand ones. The company is currently running a campaign around the new Air Jordan 4 “Toro Bravo,” for instance. But, going forward, Shoe Palace plans to roll out multi-brand campaigns quarterly, including an upcoming back-to-school one. It’s also considering themed campaigns around specific trends or cultural moments, like the Y2K revival.

At the same time, Shoe Palace remains focused on driving traffic to its stores, which are responsible for the majority of its revenue. Shoe Palace recently remodeled multiple stores by setting up branded walls for Nike, Jordan, Adidas and New Balance. It’s also building new flagships under its “Nine Three” concept and planning more in-store events to connect with shoppers. Shoe Palace held about 175 events last year, and in February, it hosted a meet-and-greet with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy.