TROOP & SPX FEATURE!

For someone with no shoe design background I think you did an amazing job. The unifying thing was the lack of subtlety everywhere: you had hiking boots, those aerobic shoes, basketball shoes, urban hip-hop styles. Did the shoes actually have any performance features at all?
I think they did, actually. We gave these things to a few basketball teams, no-one big - but we were told that they worked very well. Everything was made to the highest technical standards of the time.The HSS Corps in Korea were making Reebok at the time and they were making our shoes as well. So, the stuff was being made and being tested with all their machinery, all the flex testing and all that kind of stuff was going on. I was designing things with systems, if you like, and some of it was bullshit - to be quite honest...[laughs]

There was a crossbrace system that just happened to accommodate the ‘X’ in the SPX. So I wrote a load of bullshit about it being a crossbrace system and allowing lateral movement and all this sort of stuff. People like to think there was some kind of system going on.

Well, you wouldn’t be the only one who told a load of bullshit about their shoes.
Well, no. One thing that I wasn’t too keen on was that air support system. I tried to make the most of it, but I think it caused a lot of problems.

Do you mean in the heel, the air bubble in the heel?
No - it was more like a pump. An air cushion with valves in it to, supposedly, pump fresh air into the sole unit. It never really worked. I think it caused a lot of problems with returns. It would rattle about inside. In fact I’ve still got a pair that I use for gardening which let in water and goodness knows what. I still occasionally wear some of the stuff. Not as a fashion thing but just to go out in the garden.