Creative technology and launch platform
A trail-running launch that let 40,000 people put their own run inside the campaign — built to survive a traffic spike on a single day.
Northmark launches one trail shoe a year and the launch day is the business. Their previous launch site had done its job and then fallen over for 40 minutes at peak, which cost more than the campaign did. We were asked for something more ambitious that failed less.
01 — The problem
Northmark's audience does not browse — it arrives at 09:00 on launch day, all at once, from a newsletter and three athlete posts. The site has to hold, convert, and be interesting enough to share within the same ten minutes.
The previous launch had treated the spike as an infrastructure problem. It was also a design problem: the page asked the audience to watch, and a watching audience leaves.
02 — The thinking
We built Route Plate: upload a run, get it back as a two-ink print in Northmark's campaign colours, ready to share or order as a poster. The shoe launch became the frame around forty thousand personal artefacts.
Crucially the generator runs entirely in the browser. No queue, no server render, no cost per generation — which is also why it did not fall over.
03 — The making
Everything except the generator is static and served from the edge, so the page itself cannot be overwhelmed. The generator is a single isolated client component that loads after first paint and degrades to a gallery of pre-made plates if the browser cannot support it.
The campaign art direction came out of the tool rather than the other way around: the posters, the film titles and the in-store prints all use the exact generator output, so nothing in the campaign is unachievable by a customer.
04 — The result
Launch day ran without an outage and with a median session far longer than any previous Northmark launch, because the audience had something to do rather than something to watch.
Behind the decisions
A server-side generator would have needed a queue on the only day it mattered. Client-side rendering made the expensive feature the cheapest part of the stack.
If the posters had been prettier than what a customer could make, the tool would have felt like a toy. Identical output made it feel like access.
We built the no-JavaScript gallery before the generator, so the launch had a floor we were happy to ship even in the worst case.
Selected artefacts
Outcome
40k
In the first 72 hours, all client-side.
0
Against 40 minutes at the previous launch.
1
Everything else ships as static HTML.
“We asked for a launch site. They gave our runners a reason to open it twice, and it stayed up while they did.”
Credits
Creative direction
Júlia Ferreira
Creative technology
Teo Marchetti, Priya Raman
Campaign
Nadia Brandt, Sam Okonjo
Services used
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