TROOP & SPX FEATURE!

It’s a very different marketplace now than it was then. There’s more brands, a thousand more styles, twenty more years of design history. But I feel that someone’s going to come along with another huge fad soon. No-one’s going to understand it, but it’s just going to take off.
Maybe. I don’t know what else you can do with trainers, really. At the time we were limited in terms of technical ability, you could only do so much with the sole units. Once the technical aspect was solved it just seemed to go crazy. People are trying to put a bit more interest in shoes, like some of these more boutique designers. We were designing for high production as we were serious and a lot of these boutique styles there not talking more than 400 or 500 pairs, we were talking thousands. And a lot of their styles are based on simple cup soles and decorating the uppers, you know?

The costs are out of this world - it must have been crazy when you’re a small company setting up.
It cost about $80,000 for a set of sole units for something like the Street Slams back then. Goodness knows what it is now. And that’s a huge investment, isn’t it?

You’ve got to sell a lot of pairs to get that money back.
That’s why the Portuguese helped ease SPX into the market. It was just an off-the-shelf sole unit which did the job. The factories just weren’t up to producing the shoe. They kept breaking the needles on the embroidery on the side and just all sorts of quality control problems. But that was when we were talking about a 1000 maximum order. Once it took off we had to go elsewhere. It was Korea at that time, obviously it’s China now.