TROOP & SPX FEATURE!

Hi Mike. I understand you were heavily involved in Troop and also the creation of SPX? When was that?
I first got involved with Clive King who owned the business in ‘88. I was running a design group in London and he was a neighbour of mine. He’d been working on Troop from America and wanted to launch SPX to follow on from there. He asked me to design the SPX logo, and from there I designed product as well. My own business went a little bit wonky around that time, so eventually I joined him.

So you didn’t have any experience in footwear design? Does it seem strange now to look back on that time and think about how you got into this crazy business?
Very, very weird. I mean, I was already an old guy then. [laughs]

We’ll get to that. [laughs] I’ve always had a soft spot for the stuff you created because it just seems so of-its-time and outrageous. How do you feel now about the product you were developing?
Uummm. It was designed strictly to fit a brief. And it worked very well. Troop was happening and I think it was putting the wind up the established brands a bit. I thought it was quite exciting. I don’t claim it to be fantastic design, but it was right at the time, you know? I think it worked very well. It fitted with the brief and obviously appealed to the people who were buying the stuff. I found it so easy, to be quite honest. I had no experience in footwear design, but the technical stuff was done by the guys in Korea. I knew what I wanted it to look like and they were able to interpret it within the technical boundaries of the time.