Drone delivery? Crocs PR stunt in Tokyo produces more crashes than successful drop-offs (VIDEO)

With a buzz and a tiny gust of wind, the bright green drone takes off from its landing pad. The crowd of curious shoppers and journalists appear to hold their breath in unison. The drone rises to a height of about four meters and hovers over an elevated display covered with pairs of shoes. It slowly descends on its target.

In a perfect world – maybe even this world, in a few more years – the drone would have picked up and carried the shoes to an excited customer at a Crocs-sponsored publicity stunt in Tokyo’s posh Midtown shopping center. Unfortunately, over the course of more than ten attempts that I witnessed, the drone either failed to connect with its target, dropped the shoes, or crashed. Judging by the sheer number of onlookers, I’d be inclined to say that consumers are ready to experience drone delivery. But are drones ready to deliver?

Crocs Japan, a subsidiary of the US-based shoemaker famous (notorious?) for its foam clogs, had a simple idea to add some trendy tech to the launch event for a new slip-on sneaker model. In a press release last month, the company explained that customers would be invited to select their preferred size and color via an iPad, which would trigger a drone to pick it up from a custom display and deliver it to them (a press image alluded to the drone dropping it directly into their waiting hands).

The reality? In the hour I spent watching the event, I didn’t see a single customer receive a fresh pair of Crocs. I didn’t even see someone request a pair via the two (allegedly) connected iPads. Instead, I watched the drone fail again and again to successfully travel a mere three-to-four meters to pick up its intended payload. When it did manage to hover above a pair of shoes, the quadcopter’s dangling connector mostly failed to attach to what appeared to be magnetic discs connected to fewer than half of the shoes on the elevated display – thus causing me to question if they’d actually have the right color and size available in the first place. After failing to connect two times in a row, the drone would fly back to its landing pad with nothing to show for its short journey.

At one point, the drone apparently took on a mind of its own, knocking a pair of shoes off the display before circling around the event space and crashing into a roped-off area for the assembled members of the press (thankfully, yours truly was peering down at the scene from a third-floor overlook).

Then, it lost power and fell onto the shoe display.

Finally, the drone succeeded at picking up a pair of shoes – and dropped them into a net next to its landing pad, further away from the iPad order terminal than the display where it picked them up in the first place.

(Note: The drone-delivered Crocs event kicked off this morning at 11:00 am and runs through Sunday. I attended from 1:00 until 2:00 pm, so the team may have still been in the calibration phase. I returned around 6:00 pm and saw a second successful, albeit delayed, attempt by a Crocs staff member – not a customer.)