Company

Six decades on from its first boot, Dr. Martens has become one of the most culturally durable brands in fashion, adopted and reinterpreted by successive subcultures rather than confined to one. Much of its recent growth has come from leaning into that relationship rather than fighting it, recognising how much of the brand’s story is now told by the people who wear it, on social media, in their own words.

Tough As You is the campaign built around that idea. Launched in AW19 with four contributors sharing stories of overcoming adversity, it grew in SS20 to include six more voices chosen for their commitment to empowerment and self-expression. Asked what toughness meant to them, contributors kept arriving at the same thing from different directions: a shared fight against hardship, told through very personal definitions of what toughness actually looks like.

Challenge

The Tough As You campaign had given Dr. Martens something valuable: a community telling honest, personal stories about resilience and about the brand itself, largely through the #ToughAsYou hashtag on Instagram. The difficulty was what happened to that content next.

Social content has a short shelf life. A story could rack up genuine engagement in the moment and then effectively vanish, with no way to bring it back, build on it, or understand how it resonates with your audience after it has been scrolled past. Dr. Martens needed a way to gather these stories somewhere they could be experienced properly rather than glimpsed at, and to do it without asking their community to change how they were already sharing.

That meant finding a central, first-party home for the campaign, one that could pull content in from social, present it as a coherent experience, and give the team a real read on how people engaged with it, rather than relying on platform-level metrics that stop at likes and views.

Solution

Dr. Martens partnered with Amondo to put the content its community was already creating to work, rather than asking for anything new. The approach followed the same shape Amondo brings to any brand: centralise what’s already being made, activate it somewhere owned, and measure what it actually drives.

Centralise: capturing what the community was already saying

Rather than running a submission process, Dr. Martens used Amondo’s Instagram integration to capture content the community was already posting under #ToughAsYou. This meant the richest, most authentic stories from the campaign, the ones already resonating on social, could be pulled into a central library without changing how fans naturally chose to participate.

Activate: building market-specific Galleries and linking content to product

Amondo Galleries were built around the Tough As You stories and localised for the UK, US, Japan and Korea, mixing lo-fi video interviews with text-based content and giving each market its own version of the campaign.

The Galleries were promoted through Dr. Martens’ Instagram channels, including Instagram Stories, driving audiences from social into the owned experience.

Inside the Galleries, Click-Through Tiles connected content interaction directly to relevant product pages elsewhere on the Dr. Martens site, so the styles worn by contributors could be explored without breaking the story.

Such an easy and intuitive tool, with a bunch of powerful features that help us showcase the Dr. Martens brand and culture. We absolutely love it.

Harry Mason

Global Marketing at Dr. Martens

Every interaction inside the Galleries, from a scroll to a click on a Click-Through Tile, fed back as first-party behavioural data. That gave Dr. Martens a genuine conversion journey to follow, from a piece of community content through to a product page on their own site, rather than a proxy metric like reach or impressions on its own.

Results

Centralising community content, activating it market by market, and measuring what it actually drove turned Tough As You into a source of real, ongoing intelligence rather than a one-off campaign moment.

• 330,000 content impressions across the campaign Galleries

• 137% increase in page views compared to previous campaigns

• Click-through rate was 3x the target, driven by Click-Through Tiles connecting content straight to product pages

• First-party visibility into which stories, formats and contributors held attention across four markets

Content that would once have surfaced on a hashtag and disappeared now sits in a system Dr. Martens owns and measures, with a clear line from community story to product page.