Columbia Sportswear Will Pay for Pictures of Your Naked Feet

Nothing naughty about that, right?

Fetishized footage of feet can make money on the internet. It’s a thing. Or so we hear.

Now, to hype its Peakfreak hiking shoes, Columbia Sportswear invites fans to DM pics of their bare feet taken in the wilderness.

Adam&Eve\TBWA London developed this “F££T Fund” (H£H). Winners receive £135—the price of the shoes—and immortalization in Columbia’s “Hall of Feet” gallery.

Below, creator James Norbury attempts to unbox the merch using only his “filthy hobbit feet.”

Nice guitar licks and lingering product shots. (Is it getting hot in here?)

Below, agency creatives Freddie Mickshik and Beck Dunn chat with Muse about the campaign.

I’m sure the inspo was entirely G-rated. Do tell.

When you’re hiking, your feet take a beating. So we wanted to put the focus on them and make the point that having the right footwear really matters. If Peakfreaks are doing their job properly, you should be able to finish a pretty brutal hike, take your shoes off and your feet have come out the other side in decent shape.

Then we got talking about the whole weird culture around feet pics online. Everyone seems to know someone who’s joked about packing in their job and making a fortune selling pictures of their feet. It’s become this oddly mainstream internet thing that everyone understands, even if they’ve never actually gone anywhere near it. But we thought, “What if Columbia was the first brand actually willing to pay people for their feet pics?”

It gave us a really fun way to tap into something already in culture, while still making a really simple point about the importance of good footwear. If your feet survived the hike looking good, the PeakFreaks have done their job.

Why will Columbia’s audience like this approach?

Anyone who hikes knows bad footwear can ruin the whole day pretty quickly, so there’s a really simple product truth at the heart of it.

But we aren’t particularly fussy about who the feet submissions come from and what they looked like. If you’ve got beautiful feet, great, keep them that way with Peakfreaks. If you’ve got terrible, filthy feet, maybe it’s even more reason to start looking after them with Peakfreaks. And then, obviously, there’s another audience online who are already pretty interested in feet. (No judgement).

So, you’re betting that users will dig the quirkiness?

Hopefully they get that Peakfreaks are built to look after your feet when the outdoors is doing its best to wreck them. You can go on an eight-hour hike through mud, rocks and horrible weather and still take your shoes off at the end with feet worth showing off. That’s the joke, but it’s also the product story. And more broadly, we want people to see that Columbia takes its gear seriously without taking itself too seriously. If people laugh, get the point and actually want to join in, then it’s worked.

Why cast Norbury and his yucky toes?

He spends a lot of his life doing mad stuff outdoors, so he has that genuine adventure credibility. But he’s also got exactly the right sense of humor to front something like this without it feeling forced. You need someone who can look into a camera and ask people to DM Columbia pictures of their feet and somehow make it feel completely normal.

Any tales from the set?

The filming was actually fairly normal considering what the campaign is about. The real story started once it went live. Our Columbia client Mark Chase has had the job of being logged into the Columbia Instagram account and checking every single feet pic that gets sent in. So spare a thought for him. He’s basically become the internet’s most reluctant foot expert.

Related: Can Robert Irwin Outrun 100 Inflatable Crocodiles for Columbia Sportswear?