Wow I'm impressed. They kind of Growth hacked Instagram and made use of all those wanna-be influencers out there. Really interesting Growth tactic they're using which should be replicable:
Anyone with more than 1k Instagram followers can sign up and get free glasses and their personal referral code to promote them.
These "influencers" can offer their followers a discount on their purchase, while also receiving a commission for every Hawker customer they generate.
They called this #hawkerscampus - A quick search on Instagram for that hashtag shows 52k posts from micro influencers with at least 1k-6k followers (average seems to be around 3k followers per influencer), s that's a combined follower base of around 52m - 312m.
Would this be replicable? My guess is sunglasses are the perfect product for that tactic, they're cheap, everyone needs some and they work well with a younger demographic. Therefore I doubt it would work well with more expensive products.
I still wonder what incentives exactly these micro influencers get for promoting Hawkers. Cash? More glasses? Does anyone want to sign up and find out?
The league they're playing in with 'macro influencers' is also quite amazing. Hawkers themselves have 1m followers and work with influencers like Steve aoki (6.8m) and leo messi (97.7m !!). They must be paying jaw-dropping cash for these cooperations.