Sneaker Freaker

Have you found any examples of people being injured by shoes coming apart or by not having performance they expect?

Yes, we have actually. In a 42 kilometre run there's a number of things you need to consider. One is that it may be wet and it may be dry all in the same run and your going to heel-strike and toe-off many, many thousands of times. So you buy a shoe according to the performance you need to accomplish an incredibly arduous task - then you run in that shoe half a dozen times. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that they are going to have impact injuries. Couple that with the fact they aren't going to have any traction on the soles of the shoes and the first sign of a puddle or a downhill bitumen road in the wet and they are gone for all money. We've had a number of reports of people complaining about the injuries from their shoes only to find in every single circumstance that the shoes have been counterfeit.

I think kids out there now just accept that if you're going to buy shoes online that sooner or later you're going to get fakes. it's just accepted now.

Joe Citizen is generally horrified to find their stuff is counterfeit. Or, at least, that's the story they tell me. They may well have known exactly what they were doing but only became horrified when it was seized by customs. There's a couple of different issues there. One is, were they buying them for commercial reasons? And, just like any counterfeiter, but maybe on a smaller scale, they were prepared to take the risk to deceive the next consumer in line. I say that because it's very, very rare the stuff that comes through customs is only one or two pairs of shoes from Poor Little Johnnie who thought he was buying a real pair of Jordans. It's usually anything from 20 to 1000 pairs of shoes.