HISTORY OF SKATE SHOES - PT 2

There are other less known brands from this era that never survived such as Hobies and Makaha?
Hobie and Makaha were the first skateboard manufacturers that started to produce shoes. Makahas had a pretty innovative sole which looked like suction cups of a squid. Also their bright colors and the synthetic material was pretty outstanding for skateboard shoes of that time. The Hobies even had a toe cap reinforcement. 

Are there others that you know of?
Skateboarders used all kinds of sneakers to skate in. So there were a lot of no-name shoes on the feet of skateboarders. Hang Ten had a shoe just for skateboarding, but the shoe looked more like a golf shoe. The brand Wilson and Dunlop, famous for tennis shoes, had special skateboard shoes too. Keds had a model called Park Plus and there were even special skateboard shoes for kids called ‘Kid Power’!

How do you see Nike fitting into the skate shoe picture? They had tremendous success in the seventies and eighties but found it much, much harder when they tried to come back.
Lucky for us, Nike came back into skateboarding when we started with the exhibition, because they were the first ones to support our idea. With all their back stories, it is only normal that the scene had a very suspicious eye on their actions, but since they had quality products and a credible team, they found good support with their SB line.
Nike learned a lot from their first effort in 1997. They had a nice campaign called ‘What if’ which you still can see on YouTube and in our book. Nike showed in a very funny way, the shit that happens to skateboarders, like being kicked out of a spot by security guards to being laughed at by people who think skateboards are a toy for kids. But it felt weird to the skate society that Nike did try to speak for them. Especially in the late-nineties, skaters were a lot more against big brands. So the second time round, Nike got the right people and they ran it very good. And like in our case, this time they are really giving back something to the community. Oh yeah and by the way, the first Nike skate shoe was shit according to Big Brother magazine. Well that changed too.