Soul destroyed Hush Puppies

I recently succumb to the influence of a colleague who continually bragged to me about the comfort of his new Hush Puppies shoes and bought myself a pair. Being lucky enough to have a fairly casual office I don’t wear the shoes that often but felt assured that with a rubber sole they would last a lot longer than previous wooden soled shoes. Well I was wrong…

After perhaps five trips out in my new shoes my shoes met their nemesis, the walk home. Somehow the 10 minute trip down a London street proved to be too much and the patented Hush Puppies air cooler kicked in providing much-needed underfoot airflow. The downside to this was that the shoe was completely written off, there’s nothing the local cobbler could do for this Hush Puppies.

I thought that I would share my woes with the blog world in case anyone else was thinking about investing hard earned cash in a pair of Hush Puppies shoes. The comfort really is there, it’s a ten out of ten – but build quality is a miserable zero out of ten. I have never before had a pair of shoes combust on me before, and the best bit… I can’t find the receipt.

To tie this together into why this might be interesting on a web come social media come online strategy blog I thought I would put their customer service to the test and see, while they use social media channels for promotion would they engage in it for a mild complaint like this. How powerful and active are some of the old organisations like Hush Puppies, do they have an engaged social media strategy and what happens when someone like me tries to engage them on one… or many channels (this post is linked to from my latest tweet and linked to as a wall post on their Facebook page).

Maybe Hush Puppies will be social media heroes, maybe they will be multi channel marketing zeros… let’s find out!