Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Tipping Point

For Hush Puppies - the classic American brushed-suede shoes with lightweight crepe sole - the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. Lacoste Shirts are waiting for you here! The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives - Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis - ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the Vlasic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan. "We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were resale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were going to the Ma and Pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and buying them up." Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback. ...
By the fall of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. I feel the need-the need for cheap Wholesale nike shoes!First the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Manhattan designer, Anna Sui, called, wanting shoes for her show as well. Cheap Nike shoes are very nice here! In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound - the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand - on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique. While he was still painting and putting up shelves, the actor Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple of pairs. "It was total word of mouth," Fitzgerald remembers.
In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs of the classic Hush Puppies, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple in the wardrobe of the young American male ...
Hush Puppies had suddenly exploded, and it all started with a handful of kids in the East Village and Soho".
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