Aaron Smedley, bootmaker Le Chameau’s chief digital and marketing officer, explains how the company is embracing digital innovation.
For most of us, a pair of Wellington boots represents a functional purchase. But functional can also be luxurious. For proof, consider the footwear made by Le Chameau, a French bootmaker that sells direct-to-consumer and via specialist retailers.
According to its website, Le Chameau boots “are the only rubber boots to be handmade by a single master bootmaker”. This is reflected in the price. At the top end of its range, The Chasseur Leather-Lined Wellington will set you back £500.
“Internally we are closer to a startup than a near 100 year-old brand in our approach to digital,” says Aaron Smedley, the company’s chief digital and marketing officer. “For us, we’re a heritage and storied professional use brand out of France that’s currently owned by a British owner that loved the brand and wanted to support its journey and future,” he adds.
Some of those who have been photographed wearing Le Chameau boots include Kate Middleton and David Beckham. Such endorsements are certainly welcome. Nevertheless, says Smedley, it’s the “professional users” who attract the most interest from Le Chameau’s customers.
To understand why, it helps to think about the kinds of specialist markets that Le Chameau targets. It makes specific kinds of boots for such groups as fieldsports enthusiasts, those who work in agriculture and skilled sailors.
In November 2024, Le Chameau announced a partnership with six skippers taking part in Vendée Globe, a sailing race that involves travelling solo around the world. “I can look at that and go, ‘That’s amazing.’ I know nothing about it. I’m not an ocean sailor, but from someone that’s engaged with the brand, I can appreciate that story,” says Smedley.
“I can align with why they’re choosing our boots, and I can be engaged by that piece of creative, that video, that piece of copy, and feel the energy of the brand moving through it.”
In short, the endeavour and adventure displayed by these six skippers represents the brand’s values. And also the sense the sailors have chosen to buy a reliable product made with care and skill.
Professional users, says Smedley, “privilege us with their patronage” and offer the company “a truly defensible point of brand authority that we can then translate into engaging and compelling stories for our existing and future audience”.
So far, so traditional and yet recent history suggests luxury brands that don’t reach out to customers across multiple touchpoints ultimately tend not to last long. Accordingly, the company is active, for example, on social media. “You wouldn’t use the same copy and creative in social channels that you would in an advert in Town & Country or Vogue,” says Smedley of Le Chameau’s approach here.
“You can take yourself a little less seriously. It’s got to be entertaining, engaging. The things that you repost from your fans need to engage the wider audience and that can be funny, that can be diverse – creative that you wouldn’t put out as a brand campaign.”
In order to market its wares, the company has begun to lean increasingly on AI. “We use AI to surface data,” says Smedley, “to do a lot of the tasking that gets you to the point of saying, ‘Okay, so now what?’ Your ability to use AI and large language models, to use a natural language interface to surface data from your CDP and fundamentally understand changes in your customer behaviour, either driven by Trump and tariffs or a new marketing campaign, is vital. We look at it as saving us about eight hours a week per person of time finding and analysing data.”
More ambitiously, the company is moving into “agentic models”. “We’ve spent the last six months building out a weather model based on groundwater penetration and rainfall volume, because you don’t buy Wellington boots when its dry, you buy Wellington boots when it’s wet underfoot,” says Smedley. “None of the paid marketing platforms can get to that level of granular detail, so we have to do that ourselves, and that’s about effectively deploying our marketing dollars to the right audience in the right place at the right time.” In short, target people when and where it’s raining, or even better where it’s been raining for a while.
When sodden customers do come to Le Chameau, says Smedley, it’s important they have the best possible experience. Too often, he says, people worry about bringing digital experiences into the real world. Better to try to recreate top-end bricks-and- mortar retail online. “You can walk into a boutique in New York, and the stylist will know exactly what fit and cut you need. Because they’ve got 20 years of experience, they know body types,” he says. “Those experiences exist, they’re just not available en masse.
Where we need to get to online is that level of personalisation, but doing it without aggressively mining your data, because ultimately ecommerce is about trust.”
That sounds tough. True, says Smedley, but if it was easy, why bother? “Actually, the growth and the exciting things in our industry are going to be coming from doing really hard things and figuring out how.”
This interview first appeared in the brand new report Digital Marketing Evolution 2025. It was launched at RetailX Event’s Spring Festival earlier in May.
It explores how marketers can continue to build meaningful relationships with customers despite changes in legislation. At the same time, consumers hold unprecedented power, not only because of price transparency enabled by digital tools, but also due to their influence on social media, which can make or break the reputation of brands and retailers in an instant.
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