Social Listening - Nicks Handmade Boots

    For my social listening blog post I decided to look into a company called Nicks Handmade Boots. Nicks Boots is a Boot manufacturer located in Spokane Valley, Washington. They pride themselves on using materials sourced from the U.S. and having American cobblers hand make their boots. These boots are also probably the most high quality boots that someone who works outdoors can buy. They are also extremely expensive, The highest price boots being 850 dollars and the cheapest being 500 dollars. Of course they also sell high end belts, leather bags, and Shoes. But their primary craft is Work boots and when I saw the price of these I realized how important work boots can be for people. And the people that get Nicks, value quality over quantity much more. I think when you buy boots like these you are looking to keep them for a very long time. Nicks offers multiple different types of rebuilds to your boot so that you could essentially keep the same pair of boots your whole life. With these boots you arent just buying a pair, you are subscribing to a lifetime of service and quality from these american bootmakers.

The reason I chose this brand is because whenever I am on facebook I get a lot of Boot and shoe ads and Nicks was a recurring one. I noticed they have a very unique style in what these boots look like and they have a very high sort of arched heel with a curved up toe. Anyway the ads caught my attention and I have done a little bit of manual labor in the past so if I ever thought about getting some high quality boots I would get these.

Looking into their facebook account they have 32 thousand followers. On this facebook account they post lots of pictures of their boots and they have new reels (short videos) of their boot making process or new things their working on almost every other day.

Looking at the comments of these posts the main problem people seem to have is waiting on their boots.

As you can see the main downside of getting custom high quality boots is they're not just ready to go for you. They have to make them perfectly for the person. Chris Bailey had a good suggestion on how the company might be able to compensate for the extra long wait time, however I did not see Nick’s reply to this comment.

This is an example of Nick’s replying. While they do post a lot of content on their facebook it does seem like they could be responding a lot more to their customers' comments.

I like the posts that they make. I just think they should be more responsive to the people commenting. And Chris’s comment about compensating for people who have to wait for a very long time should totally be considered by Nick’s. If I were the brand manager I would be trying to do something for people who pay so much for these boots even if it's just something very little like a free tour around there headquarters or a small product they could provide. However I think that this business has a very strong base of costumers who are loyal to the brand and as long as they keep pleasing them and bringing new ones in they should be successful.

    Something I learned from this post is how unique and valued high quality products can be. I feel like today we live in a world where most of the clothing and footwear we buy is so cheap and we all buy so much of it that it really doesn't matter to us. When you're done with it you turn it into the goodwill or you just throw it away. These kinds of products is what everyone used to buy. While they may have been looked at as way too expensive, you get what you pay for and you hold onto those things for a long time.