In March 2020 the COVID pandemic caused severe lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia, where I live. I couldn’t continue working as a Real Estate Salesperson any longer, as I wasn’t permitted to leave the local area much at all.
In April 2020 I started working at Onlife, which had at that time just released a mobile phone game called Aglet. The game was a map based game similar to Pokemon Go, where players would navigate to locations around them and collect in game assets such as sneakers and street wear.
Initially I was employed as a casual, just helping out a friend who was one of the co-founders of the company. We were in business together with the real estate business, and he knew I could do with a few extra dollars given that real estate was essentially shut down due to lockdowns. When I started there were just a handful of us. Things grew very quickly and the role was made full time. I was essentially handling all of the in-game support requests and engaging with the community on our Discord chat server.
The game revolved around sneakers and street wear culture. We were releasing a lot of very cool sneakers into the game, and players were loving the ability to collect their favourite sneakers, albeit digital versions of them, in a game that was fun to play.
One of the “hype” brands was Adidas Yeezy’s. Designed by Ye, these shoes were as much a hit inside the game as they were in real life. One of the more popular Yeezy’s is the “Waverunner”, and so it wasn’t a big surprise that my colleagues gave me the nickname “Daverunner”, a play on my name and the popular Yeezy shoe.
So in all my engagements with our players, they knew me as Daverunner. So it made sense (to me at least) that I begin agitating for us to release a Daverunner shoe inside the game. To that end, I began dropping subtle hints in team meetings, and also began stirring up our players, getting them onboard with the idea that releasing a Daverunner was a good idea.
Our Senior Illustrator, Dan, came up with an impressive design which incorporated numerous elements that were relevant to me, and in time the tide was too much for management to ignore, and the Daverunner was released into the game.
At the time, the release of this digital shoe was the most successful of any we’d released to date, including shoes like Nike, Adidas, New Balance etc. For an “unknown” shoe, it gave us an insight into the fact that the “hype” around particular shoes wasn’t always just due to the shoe being popular in real life already, but that we could manufacture our own hype around a brand.
Over the next few years, we successfully created and launched 16 “Daverunner” shoes, all with differing styles and colours, but all featuring the Daverunner name on the sole, and all backed by the hype we created around the brand.
In addition, we released a further 12 shoes which featured “Dave” in one way or another. I had become a meme within a game.
If you’re interested, you can read about how we set about manufacturing the digital version of the Daverunner into a real shoe and made it available to purchase, ultimately selling over 700 pairs worldwide.
Here is a list of all the “Dave shoes” we created and released;
AGLET ONE ‘DAVERUNNER
AGLET ONE ‘DAVERUNNER 2.0’
AGLET ONE HIGH ‘DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE ‘DAVERUNNER GA’
AGLET GRIND ‘DAVERUNNER
AGLET ONE HIGH ‘DAVERUNNER GA’
DIME ‘DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE ‘BANNED DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE ‘DAVERUNNER NFT
AGLET ONE ‘DAVERUNNER IRL’
AGLET ONE ‘GREEN DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE ‘BLUE DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE ‘YELLOW DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE ‘FLANNEL DAVERUNNER’
POSITIVE INDUSTRIES JMPR PRO ‘DAVERUNNER’
AGLET ONE HIGH ‘DAVERUNNER ALL WHITE’
AGLET GRIND ‘DAVEBOT’
AGLET SOCKS ’N’ SLIDES ‘HOT DAVES’
AGLET ONE ‘WHAT THE’
AGLET ONE HIGH ‘WHAT THE’
AGLET TELGA ‘BEACH’
AGLET ONE HIGH ‘HOT DAVES’
GRIND ‘BANOCCOLI’
AGLET FREEFLOW ‘HOT DAVE’
TELGA ‘NAFLA UNIVERSE’
SEVEN ‘WILD WEST’
SEVEN ‘HAPPY ANIMALS’
AGLET VELCRO DAVEHOPPER
