Episode – 2110 : The History of Sneakers: How Athletic Shoes Took Over the World
Podcast Transcript
Today, they’re worn on basketball courts, fashion runways, city streets, and in almost every home on Earth.
But the humble sneaker began as a simple rubber-soled shoe and evolved into a global cultural force worth billions.
They didn’t just revolutionize footwear. Along the way, it changed sports, reshaped music and fashion, and fueled marketing empires.
Learn more about the history of sneakers and how they became much bigger than simple footwear on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Whether you call them athletic shoes, trainers, tennis shoes, running shoes, kicks, gym shoes, sport shoes, or street shoes, everyone wears sneakers. They have become a worldwide phenomenon.
In a previous episode, I looked at the global history of shoes. The state of footwear before the development of the sneaker was rather limited.
Most people wore what were called “straights”, which were shoes without a left-right differentiation. Almost all early shoes had leather uppers, varying heel heights, and leather or wooden soles, making them unsuitable for anything beyond walking. However, such limitations set the stage for the innovations that followed.
The upper class adopted cobbler innovations, while the lower class wore hand-me-downs or plain leather wraps.
The person who created the innovation that started us on the path to sneakers was a name you might be familiar with: Charles Goodyear. While he didn’t invent rubber, which was found naturally in rubber plants, he invented the process known as vulcanization in the 1830s, which made rubber durable, elastic, and practical for footwear.
With rubber, people could move silently, avoiding the click-clack of leather and wooden soles, and could “sneak up” on others, hence the name “sneakers”.
The major impact of this innovation was the remarkable adaptations that could be made with the sneaker. With flexible rubber soles, designers could now create shoes for different purposes.
Victorian England’s upper class enjoyed leisure activities like croquet, cricket, and lawn tennis. All of these games are played on well-manicured lawns. Trampling a croquet court in wooden or hard-leather-heeled shoes would ruin the surface. Rubber’s emergence and the invention of sneakers solved this problem.
At first, the earliest sneakers were what you might expect: understated, plain canvas or leather upper with a limited sole.
The design shifted during the late 19th-century tennis craze, which spurred further innovation in sneakers. Tennis shoes need to be built for cutting, agility, and quick direction changes. Soles grew sturdier, making shoes sleeker and more athletic.
Despite early developments in England, the sneaker revolution began in Chicago at a rubber shoe company named Converse.
In 1917, the company began selling a rubber-soled shoe they called the All-Star, which was one of the first mass-produced basketball shoes. In the 1920s, basketball player and salesman Chuck Taylor helped promote and refine the design, and his signature was added in 1932.
The shoe he designed became one of the most iconic sneakers in history. The Converse All-Star features a thick vulcanized rubber sole, a canvas upper, and a patch with Chuck Taylor’s name and a bold star.
The All-Star’s debut revolutionized athletic gear. The shoe remained the standard for more than 40 years and dominated basketball, holding a 90% market share until 1967.
While Converse took the lead in the United States, across the Atlantic, Adi and Rudi Dassler were revolutionizing sneakers from their company, Geda, in Herzogenaurach, Germany, writing another pivotal chapter in sneaker history.
Following the war, the brothers sought to decouple themselves from Nazi ties by openly accusing one another of closer affiliation with the party. This acrimonious divide ultimately forced a permanent end to their professional alliance.
By 1948, Adi founded Adidas, and Rudi started Ruda, which later became Puma.
Their hostility was so profound that, after founding their separate companies, Adi and Rudi Dassler never spoke to each other again, and the town even buried them on opposite sides of the cemetery.
The rivalry was so toxic that it divided the town of Herzogenaurach. It became known as the ‘Town of Bent Necks’ because residents would look at your sneakers before deciding whether it was safe to speak to you.
Nevertheless, both brothers continued to focus on sneaker innovation after their split, ushering in the modern age of sneakers. They made specialized shoes for sprinting, running, and soccer.
Perhaps their biggest innovation came in using athletes to market their products. They used their relationships with legendary sports stars to market and brand their shoes.
Their first iconic ambassador was Jesse Owens in 1936. To secure Owen’s commitment, Adi showed up at the Olympic Village with a box of custom shoes, hoping that Owens would wear them.
It was a huge success: Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, while wearing Adi Dassler’s handmade sprinting spikes, including a then-world record of 10.3 seconds in the 100 meters.
Adi Dassler crafted the blueprint for modern sneaker marketing. This innovation shifted shoes away from durability and affordability toward a new focus on athletic specialization.
Dassler recognized that Owens’s Olympic shoes weren’t visible or identifiable without a logo, so he created the iconic three-bar logo, which became Adidas’s logo.
This inclusion of their logo on the shoe triggered a revolution in aspirational marketing. The people buying Dassler shoes in the 1930s and 1940s were not going to run like Jesse Owens, but they still felt like they were wearing the same shoes as champions, and that could improve their own performance.
Following the split of the Dassler brothers into Adidas and Puma, the industry vied for elite athlete endorsements to prove the power of this new marketing strategy. A prime example of this competition involved Pelé, the legendary soccer star from Brazil.
In 1970, Puma and Adidas had reached what was thought to be an agreement not to pursue the Brazilian superstar, for fear that a bidding war would be untenable for both companies.
Puma secretly broke the pact. They negotiated with Pelé and paid him to wear Puma boots at the World Cup. In one of the most famous marketing moments ever, just before the kickoff of Brazil’s opening match, Pelé asked the referee for time to tie his shoelaces, ensuring television cameras zoomed in on his Puma’s.
The Puma corporation had paid Pele $120,000 to wear their boots, one of the greatest marketing moments in sports history.
By the time Pelé laced up his boots, another shift was occurring in basketball which was shaped by the emergence of the American Basketball Association.
As I covered in a previous episode, entrepreneurs started the ABA to compete with, and hopefully get acquired by, the NBA. The NBA was traditional with strict dress codes, while the ABA broke norms.
The ABA, with stars like Julius Erving, aka Dr. J, made shoes part of the league’s spectacle. Monochrome Converse shoes gave way to vibrant, logoed, colorful leather high tops.
The message was clear: if you couldn’t dunk like Dr. J, you could dress like him. The leather shoes popularized by the ABA sparked a fashion movement among urban African Americans that eventually spread worldwide.
Marketing innovations surrounding sneakers continued with the emergence of an upstart shoe company from Beaverton, Oregon.
Nike began in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports, founded by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman to import Japanese running shoes. In 1971, the company became Nike, named after the Greek goddess of victory, and introduced the Swoosh logo.
Nike’s earliest shoes were soccer cleats and track spikes. Bill Bowerman, who was Phil Knight’s former track coach at the University of Oregon, found important inspiration from his wife’s waffle iron.
From Nike’s own corporate history, “While glancing at his wife, Barbara’s, waffle iron, which the Bowermans had received as a wedding gift in 1936, Bill was struck by the grid pattern. The raised squares seemed like the exact geometry that could deliver the lightweight traction he’d been chasing.”
Bill ruined that waffle iron, creating rubber sole prototypes, and ended up buying several more. The Nike Moon Shoe, the star of the 1972 Munich Olympics, was the result.
The Moon Shoe was not available to non-Olympic athletes, but the standard version, the waffle trainer, was, and it produced an explosion in sales. In just 10 years, the waffle trainer boosted Nike’s sales to over $250 million, an impressive accomplishment for something that came from a waffle iron.
However, Nike’s greatest accomplishments were yet to come.
In 1984, the company signed rookie basketball sensation Michael Jordan to a 5-year, $2.5 million contract, a staggering sum for a player who had yet to play an NBA game. This was arguably the greatest moment in marketing history.
Nike hoped to sell $3 million in “Air Jordan” products in the first 3 years; they sold $70 million.
Michael Jordan’s shoes have produced 38 signature models since their debut in 1985. Air Jordans routinely top $6 billion in annual sales, just in shoes, and the sales for apparel are even more.
Michael Jordan is estimated to have made more than $2 billion from his 40-year relationship with Nike.
The success of Michael Jordan’s relationship with Nike goes beyond money. Michael Jordan became a global cultural phenomenon. The Jordan Jumpman logo is one of the most powerful brands in the world.
The demand for Air Jordans was so great that it sparked a wave of violence as people pursued the latest shoes. The “sneaker killings” were a national scourge that killed an estimated 100 kids by the end of the 1980s.
Michael Jordan was not alone in the rise of sneakers as a cultural symbol. In 1986, the rap group RUN DMC released the song “My Adidas,” which prompted a $1 million endorsement deal with Adidas.
This was notable as it was the first time a shoe was endorsed and promoted by non-athletes. During a concert at Madison Square Garden, an Adidas executive was invited to the show and saw DMC stop the show and ask everyone to hold up one of their Adidas shoes.
The executive was overwhelmed at the sight of 40,000 concertgoers holding up their Adidas Superstars. The message to Adidas was clear: the brand meant far more than even the company realized.
Adidas migrated from a baseketball shoe used by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become part of the surging hip-hop culture. The unique rubber toe design of the Superstar model made it a perfect choice in the emerging breakdance culture in the 1980s.
Despite the 1980s being the golden age of sneakers, their popularity and cultural importance have only increased since then.
In the 21st century, sneakerheads, with their extensive collections, have continued the sneaker revolution and financially buttressed an industry expected to reach 200 billion dollars per year by the end of the decade.
In many cases, these collectors purchase sneakers and don’t even wear them. They keep them in their boxes and treat them almost like an investment. Sneaker companies have taken advantage of this phenomenon by releasing shoes in limited quantities and capitalizing on demand by charging extremely high prices.
While a typical pair of sneakers might retail for approximately $250, certain limited-release Air Jordans can fetch nearly $500. Even more exclusive collaborations featuring famous designers or entertainers have been known to reach prices as high as $25,000.
The record price for a single pair of sneakers was $2.2 million for the game-worn Nikes used by Michael Jordan in the 1998 NBA Finals.
Despite rumors to the contrary, there are currently no plans for an Everything Everywhere line of Air Jordans. However, a podcast worn pair of my Keds may someday go up for auction.
What began as a simple rubber-soled shoe designed for comfort and sport became something far larger than anyone could have imagined. Sneakers helped transform athletics, shaped music and fashion, created billion-dollar brands, and turned ordinary footwear into objects of identity, status, and obsession.
Few everyday items reveal so much about technology, culture, and commerce. From dusty gym floors to playgrounds to concert halls, the history of the sneaker shows that sometimes the most influential inventions are the ones that are right under our feet.This episode can be found at: https://everything-everywhere.com/the-history-of-sneakers-how-athletic-shoes-took-over-the-world/