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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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Heelys: Hot Trend or IPO Interest

December 11, 2006

Tomorrow we'll be releasing our hot searched-for-products of this holiday season. As a little taste of whats coming, over the last several weeks, we've noticed a steady increase in searches for Heelys (the tennis shoes with wheels responsible for many mall near-collisions). This morning, reading through my RSS feeds, I came across this article from Bill Simpson at Seeking Alpha, pondering if Heely's were just a passing fad.

One of the best ways to gauge consumer interest in a product is to chart the volume of queries on that product or brand over time. Here's the Heelys chart:

heelys chart.png

It appears that Heelys is enjoying a substantial lift in search volume when compared with last holiday season (already doubling last year's searches). I'm still investigating the spike in July as either a safety related concern or possibly related to the use of Heelys by "So You Think You Can Dance" contestant Ivan Koumeav during one of his dance solos (scary that I know that).

A more interesting question however, is the recent surge in Heelys searches purchase related or the result of last week's IPO. To answer that question I leveraged the full line-up of Hitwise tools. Clickstream analysis reveals that only 7.9% of last week's upstream visits to Heelys.com came from financial sites. Search Term analysis revealed only a few Heely terms associated with the IPO, and finally I looked at the demographics of visitors to the site, which were predominately female age 25-44 (most likely moms looking for the shoes as holiday gifts).

So bottom line, even though Heelys have been around since 2000, it looks like we're seeing a major resurgence in wheeled shoe interest.

Posted by Bill Tancer at 05:37 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Shopping and Classifieds