I actually saw them in New York two or three years ago. They did a few styles, but you couldn’t wear them for more than an hour as they just had nothing in the sole. I don’t know who was making them...
It could be anybody, to be quite honest. We were getting the stuff made in Korea and it turned out the guy in Korea was making stuff and selling it to South America without us even knowing and using some of our design stuff, presumably maybe doing some of his own. And he was doing the same with SPX. It’s very much a cut-throat and very crooked business. Other people were just turning the letters around and, instead of SPX, it was SXB or DSX or something, but the styles would be exactly the same.
The new guys that running the SPX brand have said that the letters stand for something like “Sports Performance Extreme”.
Well, Clive was the guy and, obviously when I got involved one of the first questions I asked was, ‘Well, what does it mean?’ And what he said to me was, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It was a sticker on a freight package.’ He was sitting in an airport somewhere and he saw this sticker that was for something like Special Express something-or-other. Whatever, anyway, it didn’t actually mean anything at all relating to the sports shoes. So, where they got that from, I don’t know.
That’s one of the original Troop styles. I didn’t actually design that, but I would say that was almost certainly the case. The Troop logo itself is a double-ended arrow. That’s taken from a street sign which means ‘both ways’ or something like that in New York. The brand is based around New York so that, I’d say, is almost certainly intended to be like a police badge. I reworked some of those designs and updated them, but basically those early styles came from America designed by this young guy Theo in the warehouse.
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