In a nutshell: Lots of confusion, not a lot of traffic to the stores.

In looking at their Facebook Page (http://on.fb.me/9YycjZ) only 26K people said they were attending the Free Jeans event, but the wall is full of people thinking that if they update their status saying they checked in, they were going to get a free pair of jeans. Besides that general assumption, the other most prominent posts were how do I check in and do I have to have an iPhone? Granted there is a sprinkling of “Thank You’s” and “I got my free jeans”, but it seems in general there was a large gap in understanding how to check in with Facebook Places, and how the distribution of the jeans was handled.

With over 3100 stores, and only 10,000 jeans to give away, I have a feeling if some folks did understand how to check in, more than quite a few would  have been disappointed.  There also seems to be technology problems, as this article from Business Insider  (http://read.bi/c4teW0 ) states they were issued a coupon and then told there were no jeans left.

But I wonder how many folks, who like me are a bit more tech savvy, had my experience. Once inside the store, I opened the app, clicked on Places and the Gap store did not even come up in the list of locations…though about 30 other places did. Once I entered Gap in the search field, the store did appear, but then when I tried to check in, I got an error message saying something went wrong. In speaking with a co- worker who checked out another store, he also had to go through the whole process manually. In the end, he said he didn’t really have to formally check in to get his free jeans.

While at the store, I spoke at length with the very friendly and helpful Gap employees. They said their small store in Los Angeles had 9 coupons and they were gone within the first hour, but that’s not a lot of jeans. They did not say they were seeing a large increase in traffic to the store, but those who did come in to get the jeans, did buy other items. So that’s somewhat positive. At the other more central Gap store that was given over 25 jeans, they hadn’t even finished distributing them by midday.

So overall, probably not a huge success, especially as compared to the Groupon offer they promoted in August where 500K people opted in, but I give the Gap credit for trying.  And all those free jeans certainly help build brand loyalty that may have been bruised by the recent logo fiasco.