Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
“You’ve seen the five-toed running shoes?” This was political commentator Keith Olbermann during an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman in May. He had limped onto the stage with a cane and his left foot in an orthotic boot. When Letterman asked about the injury, Olbermann blamed it on the toe shoes. “They’re great for your knees. They’re great for your hips. They make you actually feel younger,” he said. “Unfortunately, if you try to run in them and you weigh more than 175 pounds, you will break something.”
Olbermann was talking about Vibram FiveFingers, a kind of glove for the foot made by the Italian rubber-sole specialist. For Vibram, this talk-show banter was a small public relations headache. It also was a signal of how popular its toe shoes had become since the company began peddling them six years ago. Back then nobody was interested, says Tony Post, chief executive officer of Vibram’s U.S. division. He first showed the design to his biggest sole customers to see if they wanted to partner on a product. They passed, so he brought it directly to retailers. They also balked. “It was just a little too strange,” says Post. This year the company is on pace to sell some $100 million worth of FiveFingers—a sum that will account for more than half of its North American revenue.
In between, barefoot running happened. A subculture of distance runners who consider the average shoe to be an affront to the human foot gained a broad following through a bestselling book and, along the way, created a market that is fast approaching half a billion dollars. In other words, people who believe you should run without shoes have kick-started a running-shoe boom. At the 750 running specialty stores tracked by the Leisure Trends Group, “minimalist shoes,” which did not exist as a category until 2008, now account for 9 percent of the market, with more than $24 million in sales so far this year. The mainstream retail chains, according to SportsOneSource analyst Matt Powell, are slated to sell $350 million worth of minimalist shoes for 2011. If you include “lightweight” shoes, a category created in 2009, sales could hit $1.8 billion. The trend toward less shoe, says Powell, is accounting for virtually all the growth in the $6 billion running market. The demand has shoe companies hustling to bring new products to market and wrestling with two big questions highlighted by Olbermann’s appearance on Letterman: Will people get hurt? And will barefoot shoes become everyday footwear?
At the moment, no one can agree on what makes a shoe barefoot or minimal in the first place. Powell reports he sent out 25 requests to industry sources for help to craft a definition and “got 27 different answers back.” Among barefoot enthusiasts, however, there is a simple litmus test: the heel strike. Their claim is that runners were never meant to land on their heels. We only began doing so about 40 years ago when cushioned shoes interfered with pain signals from the nerves in our feet. Blocking this information, the argument goes, disrupts natural, midfoot striding form and causes injuries.
The measure of barefoot belief, then, is how much padding shoemakers are willing to shave from the heel. A traditional running sole has 12 millimeters more cushioning in the heel than in the forefoot, or a 12-millimeter “drop” in the industry parlance. Vibram, Vivobarefoot, and Merrell—all newcomers to the running business—have courted the purists with flat profile, or zero drop, shoes. Established players New Balance and Saucony have taken a gradual approach and introduced 4-millimeter drop models before going to flats. Nike both anticipated and sidestepped the trend when it introduced the Free line in 2004. The shoes promised a “natural motion” with flexible, segmented soles and lightweight uppers, but left about a centimeter of extra cushion in the heel. Reebok basically did the same with the launch of its RealFlex line in April. Asics, meanwhile, has staked its place as a barefoot denier. In a video for Asics’ new 33 line, which can be found on Powell’s list of minimal shoes, Brice Newton, the company’s product manager for performance running, boasts that the shoes “provide a cushioned ride from heel-strike all the way through toe-off.” It may as well have been a declaration of war to the barefoot crowd. “If somebody’s running barefoot,” Newton says of the trend, “they’re running barefoot. We don’t really have a product for [that person].”
