The Future of the Sneaker Business First Requires a Future ⇥ defector.com

Corbin Smith, Defector (gift link):

Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour: These companies do not actually spin thread, tan leather, vulcanize rubber, or even put together the shoe. They design prototypes of a product and then facilitate all the actions necessary to make money off it. They pressure supplies and manufacturers at every level of the manufacturing process, send the product all over the world, sell it at a markup. The people in the brand offices coordinate that labor; the people in those factories actually do it. This is globalization, and it encompasses every transaction in the world economy.

To walk the floor at The Materials Show, an industry event that goes down four times a year — there’s two in Portland, home of Nike, Adidas of America, and several other major activewear concerns, and another pair in Boston, the home of New Balance — is to see that grand abstraction made flesh. In the aisles, a parade of designers, materials acquisition people, and executives clad in Activewear Professional go from booth to booth, look at threads and rubbers and leathers, chat with vendors, and take little notes. “The show is about sourcing raw materials, mostly for the footwear industry,” Hisham Muhareb, the founder and owner of The Materials Show, tells me. “Nike, Adidas, Columbia, Reebok, New Balance — their product teams come here and they meet new vendors, meet their old vendors, talk about materials, components, and process.”

So you can see why I needed to be there. […]

I savoured this essay when I first read it a couple of days ago, and it has been sitting with me ever since. It is tremendous. It is the kind of thing that makes me love paying for Defector, maintaining the kind of subscriber relationship a big corporation could only dream about. You might not care much about shoes or apparel, but I think you will appreciate this article anyway.