Tech billionaires wear them,
babies wear them,
even the US vice president is a fan.
Sneakers. Trainers. The tennis shoe.
Whatever you want to call them, they’re everywhere -
maybe even on your own feet right now.
Tens of billions of pairs are manufactured every year.
The biggest athletic shoe companies make more in revenue
than the GDP of some countries.
So how did a piece of rubber, leather and canvas
become such big business?
Let’s go back to the late 19th Century.
New sports like croquet and tennis required new footwear
to protect the grass lawns they were played on.
Not long after, sneaker brands started to appear.
Converse’s most famous shoe, the All-Star, made its debut in 1917.
Two of the biggest names in the sneaker game, Adidas and Puma,
were each founded by a German brother.
Adi and Rudolf Dassler
got together in the 1920s
to make athletic shoes.
The Dassler brothers capitalised on something that’s common sense today.
If you want people to buy your shoes, get someone famous to wear them.
That person was US Olympian Jesse Owens.
But Owens, a black athlete,
was set to compete at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin
at a time when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
were firmly in control of Germany.
The Dassler brothers who, along with many German industrialists,
had joined the Nazi party, took a risk in approaching Owens.
The risk paid off when Owens went on to win four gold medals.
It was an incredible coup -
a black man upstaging Hitler’s racist ideology on the world stage.
And he was wearing Dassler shoes.
After the war, the brothers split, each to form their own company -
Adi set up Adidas and Rudi, Puma.
In fact, Adidas is an amalgamation
of its founder’s first and second names, Adi and Dassler.
His brother Rudi tried the same trick, and called his brand 'Ruda'
before realising that it didn’t roll off the tongue.
But the story of sneakers is not just about
finding the right name for your product.
It’s also about marketing.
Nike sold huge numbers of shoes during the jogging boom of the 1970s.
But when they wanted to move beyond running,
they needed something extra special.
And they found it in basketball legend Michael Jordan,
making him the biggest athletic spokesperson of all time.
The Nike-Jordan partnership was a huge success
generating more than $100 million in sales in its first 12 months,
rising to an incredible $3.6 billion,
or around £2.6 billion, in revenue in 2020.
Nike was also adept at spotting other opportunities.
Did you know they paid just $35, or roughly £284, in today's money
for their famous Swoosh logo?
And that the famous Nike slogan “Just Do it”
was inspired by the last words, “Let’s Do it”,
of murderer Gary Gilmore prior to his 1977 execution?
It’s not just athletes - and death row inmates -
who inspire us to wear sneakers.
In the mid-80s, hip-hop group Run-DMC signed a landmark deal with Adidas
paving the way for many more lucractive partnerships
between shoe makers and artists.
Today, Kanye West and Rihanna each have their own line of sneakers.
And they’re worth big bucks.
West’s collaboration with Adidas, the Yeezy sneaker line,
was valued at over £1.2 billion in 2019 .
But what does our appetite for all these shoes mean for the world?
Environmentally they are something of a disaster.
A single shoe can contain 65 different parts,
and hundreds of different processing steps.
As you can imagine, our shoes stick around in landfills
long after we’ve thrown them away.
A rubber sole might take 80 years to biodegrade.
Plastics and synthetics take hundreds more.
Several sneaker companies are experimenting
with recycled materials and more sustainable production methods.
But the legacy of our love affair with sneakers
will be with us for many, many years to come.