Pumps About Town with Google Maps

Shoes About Town is an inspired promotional campaign from New York shoe salon Bergdorf Goodman.

The promotional campaign encourages people to take an Instagram photo and then to post it on Twitter with the hashtag #BGSHOES. The photos of the shoes then appear on a great looking custom map, created using the Google Maps API.


I suspect that the inspiration for the design of the hand-drawn type zoom controls on the Bergdorf Goodman map and the idea for the map may owe something to Mike Gleason's tutorial Create Zoomabable Images with the Google Maps API.

Mike's tutorial explains how you can create a Google Map replacing the normal Google Maps map tiles with your own image.


The promotional campaign may also have been partly inspired by Zappos, the online shoes retailer. In 2009 Zappos created a real-time map of orders placed on the Zappos website called Zappos Map.

Zappos add photographs of their product being brought in real-time on a Google Map of the United States. If you click on any of the photographs on the map then you are taken to the web page for that product (and Zappos presumably hope you will be tempted to buy the product yourself). This is a little trick that the Bergdorf Goodman map is missing at the moment.

If I was Bergdorf Goodman I would add links from the photos of their shoes on the map to the product's page on their online store,