Almost daily we are shown, or become aware, of a new sneaker collaboration. Stores, celebrities, bands and even YOU (via custom websites) have the opportunity to “design” (more aptly choose) colour schemes for longstanding favourites. The results are mixed. The hype derived from the perceived cool of the collaborator.
All too often, the selected model (or the model chosen for the collaborator) falls too close to the overly popular models. We see Reebok pumps, Nike Dunks, AF1s and Shell toes. Sure, we see a few runners, and the occasional surprise. But, most of the time things are just a touch predictable.
There are exceptions to this rule, in both brand and collaborator. On the brand level, PUMA has used a great number of their back catalogue for special editions. The Roma to celebrate a Johnny Damon All-Star game appearance. The RS-100 for a great collection featuring the art of BJ Betts. And, of course, the Clyde has proved very versatile. Latest in the high profile release mire is Puma’s work with Sneaker Freaker. Purveyor of sneaker history, news and related issues, the Magazine itself has already made waves with shock collaboration, namely meeting Lacoste.
Since 2003 Sneaker Freaker has documented the global phenomenon of sneaker mania. The craze for sneakers certainly captures the staff as well, who dive into all potential collaborations with incredible verve. Most recently, with Puma, the SF team produced two colour-ways of the Blaze of Glory. Once again throwing the sneaker community for a loop, Sneaker Freaker gets its hands on a long hibernating model, gives it some energy, and unleashes it with some secret animal DNA.
I spoke with Woody, founder and editor-in-chief of Sneaker Freaker, about the process of designing the shoe. While I had him, I figured who better to ask about the market as a whole and to clarify some perceptions I have. Enjoy. - Nick Schonberger
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How did your relationship with Puma develop for this project, and what was the initial process like working through the archive?
Puma and SF have a very strong relationship at an Australian level. We have done a lot of work together on stuff previously and they have supported the magazine from the earliest days. For the PUMA guys here in Melbourne (Shout to Sherrin, Liam and Carly), it's a major feather in their caps that we did this together... colabs of this sort are still really rare as most multi-nationals couldn't give a rats about Australia. With regards to the shoe, all I originally said to them was that I wanted a new shoe, and I asked for the polar opposite of the Clyde. The Disc Blaze is great but the Disc is a little crazy some days and besides, it's been done before. So what better than to bring a completely new take on that shoe with the classic Trinomic sole unit? Plastic straps on sneakers are indicative of a certain design era that will always be challenging - just check the Omni Lite and Huarache for example. And if you ever get to try the Blaze of Glory on, it is mental comfortable, probably superior to Air Max for all round appeal. For a lot of Nike heads that's heresy but I defy anyone to try and tell me different.
How important is it for you to help reintroduce a model, like with the Lacoste Missouri?
I think that with the position we are in, we have a duty to ourselves and to the world at large to only put our imprimatur to different models. New models. Things the world hasn't seen before or have been lost for ages. With our help, maybe we can break a new shoe for a brand? I don't know, I guess that's the idea. I can't be writing shit in the magazine and then not being held to account personally.... and I have been very big on the need for new stuff to come through. The Missouri was right out of left field and look at Lacoste now! So I'd rate that as probably one of the most successful colabs of recent years... not for resale value alone, or hypeability or raw sales, it just sucker punched everyone. I think the general reaction at the time was GTFO! Then when they saw the shoe it all made sense, and now the Missouri is an established shoe. Under Mark Godwin's direction, Lacoste has really cemented it's reputation.
Since you mention plastic straps, let's discuss the role of material and its ability to push a design forward. I'd like to sort of chat generally, but also hear you rational for the material choices on the Puma.
Well materials is one thing... I had to design ours without a catalogue of high-tech meshes and new materials in my hand so it's fairly limited in some ways unless you're being given access to some laboratory and a mad professor. So colour was very important... Let me ask you - how hard do you think it is to design a really stand-out shoe colour these days? Well take that thought and multiply it by a thousand, then double it and add a million and then you'd be about half way there. So when we sat down to do the shoe, we had to think about being sympathetic to the silhouette first and foremost, then we had to filter that through 30 years of sneaker history. The first colour was greys with a little red and cyan blue which fitted with our theme that had been developed. A week later, after I had the colours sorted I realised that maybe I had subconsciously absorbed my 3 year old boy Sonny's obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine. That freaked me out! None of us can escape our experiences and influences but I wasn't expecting that one. I might point out that you can do anything and some tithead will always find a Nike shoe to compare it to. In our case it was the Structure, which is idiotic, even if the two shoes are somewhat alike. I mean really.... The PUMA was designed over a year and a half ago, and the Structure was not on the cards, so how am I supposed to know it's gonna be released again? And I can't use a little red and blue? It is easy to get all worked up about it but a little controversy never hurts and you certainly can't keep every punk happy. We got dissed on Puma Talk as well, which was funny coming from there.
And, one more on material. Shark?
Yeah that was a nice little surprise. Remi Carette who is our Online Media Director came up with the shark concept at the pub on a Friday afternoon. It was hell hot outside and we were talking about the shoe and how we should do something Australian that we could communicate. The day before an abalone diver in Eden had been swallowed up to his waist by a Great White and he fought the thing off with his bare hands and survived, it was a crazy story on the news down here. Sharks are a fact of life if you swim here, nearly everyone knows someone who has been bitten by a shark. We also eat a lot of shark here in fish and chips, we call it flake, it’s real name is Gummy Shark as they have no teeth. Anyway... the more we delved into the shoe, the more it became obvious that it was meant to happen... after the initial Great White design was sent over, we asked Puma if we could do a small run in real shark skin and Bob and Mark hooked up some samples. The weird thing when we saw the shark was that the leather had gone black in the curing process, and I mean deep inky black, not charcoal. And the texture is unlike anything you have ever seen, the only material I can compare it to is elephant hide. Once we realised it was jet black, it demanded a second colour-way, so out popped the second shoe and soon as I saw it, I knew it was gold. It just doesn't look like anything else. The turquoise isn't really a reference to our Snkr Frkr house colours, it just worked with the overall scheme and the popping fluoro pink I might add, is a sampling error that we all loved here in the office so we elected to let it live. Again, at the time, fluoro wasn't about, and now it's a little overplayed but what isn't these days? I think it’s neat, it certainly looks a little weird where it is placed and I like that. Unfortunately the shark will only be produced in very small numbers and we will be giving away most of ours, but if you check Sneaker Freaker you'll find a way to win at least one pair!
On the subject of colour you raise, unintentionally, two points. The first relates to Thomas the Tank Engine. What would be wrong with gleaning influence there? This market seems overly concerned with only cool nostalgia, and not ubiquitous experience.
I don't think there's anything wrong with referencing Thomas the Tank Engine per se, except that it's so far outside the paradigm of cool that it's possible unwise to admit that I even thought twice about it. Man, I'd be a sitting duck – could you imagine? Forgetting the wisdom of such a move, and the fact that Thomas is a well known trademark, I have no right to appropriate him as nostalgia, as I actually have no memory of him from when I was a kid. When I realised I may have been unintentionally influenced in some way by my son's play things, it was just one of those funny moments where I realised that even I could be influenced by my surroundings surreptitiously. When you have kids you get to re-engage in some great games with them, and my evenings now consist of stories about Spiderman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers. These corporate constructs have so much meaning to a three year old it's unnerving sometimes - how and where do they develop such fixations and brand awareness at such an age? This is pretty powerful stuff. It's deep shit! It's like when you go to Japan and see Winnie the Pooh and Tweety and Daffy Duck all the little fad scenes that they seem to have on permanent rotation, I am sure those colours infiltrate fashion, art, sneakers etc for the time that they have the stores in Harajuku/Omotesando. It's all part of the giant mixing pot that gives birth to trends and somehow initiates those moments where everyone seems to think of something at the same time, like paint brush fonts and inverted college logos.
Second, that Nike comparison. In terms of colour you've hit the nail. But what of silhouette? It seems, often, that many folks can't get beyond the swoosh and see positives in other brands.
Yeah I think you're right. That'd be 30 years of very powerful Nike marketing in full effect. Who does it better than them? Apple? Maybe, they certainly seem to invoke the same sense of devotion and awe from their customers. The kicker with Nike is that they nearly always have the best shit right? So marketing doesn't really explain the whole deal. I wont lie, I love their shoes... they have almost the best in everything and I sometimes wonder how anyone competes with their back catalogue? Saying that, I kids need to open their eyes to the sense of 'cool' being a broader church... and I fully endorse anyone who wants to go their own way. It’s easy to say it used to be cool to be an individual back in my day, but I guess youngsters have always and will always strive to prove their individuality chops by pretty much wearing the same shit as everyone else. And I was guilty as sin when I was a teenager!
I think that it is worth discussing time line. Just how long it takes to get a project like this rolling.
The entire process took well over a year, maybe close to 18 months. We finished the designs in a few days, let them mature for a week or so just to be sure in our own minds and then I forget how long a first sample took, but when it came back, it was pretty off the mark, the colours all needed to be adjusted. I made some notes and we sent the shoe back, crossed our fingers and they did a great job - it was just about perfect second time around. Any changes take about 6-8 weeks I think... so the more you meddle, the longer it takes. 18 months does seem like a long time, but there's always scheduling issues that the brand has to consider, so all in all I think this time frame is about right. I have certainly heard of worse, and the issue is that by the time it does come out, you're kinda over it by then. Lucky for me I'm still like a little kid the night before christmas. I can't wait for the black shoe to come out.
Being in the position you are, do you feel pressure to collaborate on a shoe that will be deemed collectable? Or, do you approach it as making something fresh that you really want to wear?
I'm not really sure how you deliberately design something that can be deemed collectable, but anytime you create a colab type of product with limited production, I guess there is always an element of that which cannot be avoided. As far as numbers go, our shoe was capped at just over 500 units, and I actually requested that we do that many rather than less... If I was just interested in making a collector shoe, I'd have kept that number much smaller and watched the eBay price go nuts! It's simple mathematics. But my feeling is that that's kinda artificial and I'd rather that a reasonable number of kids who dig the magazine can get the shoes if they try hard enough. Each store gets a pretty small allocation so if you’re keen, get to your local PUMA retailer and put your face about. As far as designing products goes, I think the only way you can approach it is to just do something you are personally happy with and try and set the bar a little higher or at least move the goal posts sideways a little. Otherwise, why would you even think of throwing your name all over a shoe?
And, back to shark, there haven't been too many shoes fish scale. I can only think of the Adidas x Oki-Ni Nile carp shoe. Other than being exceptionally cool, what was the inspiration to get that done?
Yeah I remember the Oki-Ni shoes, they were a crazy looking thing. Adidas also did a salmon skin ZX this year, which was really striking as well. Actually now that I think about it, I remember that as we were waiting for our shark samples to turn up, I heard from the guys at Bodega that they might have done something with shark skin but I never heard about it again. I must ask Dan about that, I wonder what happened? The inspiration was just to see what it looked like really, we thought we might get a sample made even if it was just one pair. When it came in and floored us, it just had to happen on a bigger scale and I shall always be thankful for Puma (Mark McGarry and Bob Michalsky especially) that they went all out to help us get that done.
Objectively, which of the brands do you see as doing the best job with heritage product. Nike, Adidas and Puma obviously all use history to their advantage in marketing and in the more casual lines. Lacoste has done a great job, I think. New Balance keeps its models moving. We see a trend. Additionally, how important is it to promote history and heritage and past accomplishment? Are there any downsides, do you think, there?
I don’t know how objective this answer can be, because it’s not a scientific process, it’s totally subjective in every way except sales data. I think everyone is more or less over the ‘retro thing’ in the industry, however it is cheap to produce (compared to developing new models), it seems almost limitless in potential and unlikely to fall over unless we all start wearing super hi-tech boots which can make you fly to work or something... There are new shoes being made all the time and some of them survive, some don’t. The market is very reactive to what kids want and buy, so if we all decided to stop wearing old shoes, I’m sure the brands would switch very quickly to a new paradigm. To answer the other part of your question, I think Lacoste has probably done the best job with the resources they have in some ways - they have a nice mix of retro and new and have still retained the essence of the brand in every thing they do. New Balance is now introducing new models which will give them a nice flip. Nike is Nike. They could stop designing shoes tomorrow and still bring out reissues as often as they need - it's a legacy of 30 years of unlimited design. PUMA could do so much, they have some killer shoes left in the vault and I think Adidas is the sleeping giant, they have so much potential that if things swing their way a little in the market, they could kill it. So that’s a nice way for me to sit on the fence... give everyone a nice compliment.
I also want to talk about the sneaker market generally. We've touched on Nike's position, but it also seems every once and a while a shoe sneaks in that becomes a must have... whether it be a certain New Balance or Puma, or even Reebok model. Where do you see the thrux of collecting moving? Remaining pretty geared toward singular interest, or becoming more eclectic?
I think in some ways the market has become much more eclectic. There's just so much choice now that the average sneaker lover has a million models to choose from and you now what, they're nearly all good. I mean you just have to look at our New Releases pages, there's mountains of shoes from so many brands it's hard to keep up. But saying that, there's only so many shoes that will ever be considered collectible and will actually appreciate in value. And you're talking about colabs in limited numbers, they are still the shoes that resonate at a profound 'street' level. Anyone who has more than 10 pairs of sneakers can be considered a collector I guess, but my view is that a collector in 2008 means someone who buys shoes based on potential resale value or what is hyped on the blogs. And they are probably a Nike head. If you check our online Price Guide (http://www.sneakerfreaker.com/feature/sneaker-price-guide/) that we published at the end of 2007, there's probably 300 Nikes and less than 100 of all the other brands put together, so that just shows how skewed the scene is towards one brand. There's only so many shoes at an extreme hype level, but there have been a few notable exceptions such as the Provider NB 1500 and the Patta Gel Lyte. They were both off the hook, but Nike still rule the roost when it comes to the stuff with the highest resale value. Adidas are making moves in the states from what I can see, and just maybe the penny has finally dropped for them, it certainly seems like they want to take Nike on in the cool stakes.
I'm interested in getting a little primer on the Australian sneaker scene. Obviously there are brands that resonate in different regions more than others. For instance, few Americans got that excited about a Diadora Borg Elite, but that shoe did play a role in the casual scene in England. What brands, or even styles, represent the growth of an aussie scene?
Well the scene here is vibrant, growing and pretty friendly and revolves around the magazine and the best stores in each city like Provider, Apartment, Highs and Lows and Footage. Certainly, it's a lot less competitive than other places but we do pay a lot for shoes, maybe twice as much as in the US. We're a very small market - 21 million people – the upside is that we can get pretty much any shoes we want here, including Nike SB, which may surprise some cats in NY and London. Aside from retail, we don't have a whole lot to boast about as far as home grown sneakers, but we do have the Dunlop Volley and KT26, which are two el cheapos I had as a kid. Everyone had them in the seventies because it was all that existed. Basketball is almost dead here, but Jordan has a huge following, and like anywhere, we got tribes into hip hop, rock, techno who all have a uniform of sorts. So all in all, it's same as anywhere, pretty well established by now and a thriving little community.
Shifting slightly and as a way of concluding - English seems the primary language of "street culture." You've made a move to make SF available in Spanish, and I wanted to know a little more about that.
Yeah, the magazine has been available in Spanish from earlier this year. It's a joint project with the guys from Trust Nobody, with Toni Garcia being given the hard task of translating my prose. The mag is published a little after the International edition and will probably be 90% the same, with some added spicy local flavour and updated news. So far it's going very well - Barcelona is home to a small but dedicated sneaker scene, and with Bread and Butter in town twice a year, it's well and truly on the map for just about everyone in the industry. On a personal note, I love Barcelona so it's nice for me to have a second home in Europe after London. Given Sneaker Freaker started as a hobby more or less, the fact that it's now translated into Spanish is so far out that I can't believe it myself some times.
