Fancy footwear

A splash of technological innovation can transform even the most pedestrian activity into the latest craze, says Richard Brass

Maybe this risks showing my age, but when I was a kid the coolest things in footwear were baseball boots. Black canvas ankle length shoes with white toecaps, flimsy soles and long laces, their most important feature was the white rubber circle covering the ankle bone.

There was no air or gel in them, no mention of their physiological benefits and, as far as I know, they had nothing to do with baseball, but without that little rubber circle it really wasn’t advisable to go outside.

No doubt someone did very well out of a slavish addiction to this craze, but nowhere near as well, I suspect, as the company behind the latest footwear fad that’s gripping children all over the world – or at least wherever there’s spare cash and parents who can be swayed by persistent pestering.

You’ve probably seen them sweeping through a shopping mall near you – kids, and the occasional adult with a healthy inner child, who appear to be wearing ordinary sneakers but are gliding along as if on rails, and who then stop suddenly and resume normal walking, but with a deeply self-satisfied look.

What you’re seeing are sneakers with retractable wheels, an astonishingly simple idea that no one had thought worth patenting until Texan shoe manufacturer Heelys did so in 2002. It hasn’t regretted the decision. With just 33 staff, Heelys’ sales reached $44 million last year and $28.5 million for the first half of 2006.

Some schools in the US have banned them, along with some supermarkets tired of seeing thrill-seeking kids making the most of those long, wide aisles by testing their cornering skills around the tinned vegetables corner. But the craze looks like it has a long way to go before burnout, and Heelys recently applied to raise $115 million in a flotation to keep the hungry markets satisfied.

Sneakers with retractable wheels, an astonishingly simple idea that no one had thought worth patenting until Texan shoe manufacturer Heelys did so in 2002. It hasn’t regretted the decision

But shoes with wheels in them are still not the last word in high performance footwear. Nike has just taken the shoe into a strange new universe by applying for a patent for the ‘Game Pod’. Described by Nike as a system for promoting physical activity for video game-players, this is an electronic device crammed with sensors and a GPS tracker that slips into a shoe to measure the amount of exercise the wearer gets.

When the walking’s over, a detachable memory chip is removed and plugged into a games console, where the data is used to beef up the resources of the user’s video game character, adding extra virtual strength, endurance or speed, and giving the weary walker an edge in the eternal battle against other game-playing console-heads.

With studies indicating that obesity is one of the biggest health problems affecting children and that screen-based entertainment is one of the biggest causes of that obesity, both of these products are being touted as ways of coaxing exercise-resistant children and games addicts off the couch and onto the pavement to put one foot in front of another for a change.

It’s a little early to tell whether Nike’s effort will really encourage hardened game-players out into the open. There doesn’t seem much point in all that exhausting movement while there’s no shortage of games in which you can be master of the virtual universe without even sitting up.

And how much fitness Heelys footwear generates is equally debatable, given that they’re shoes made for not walking. But at least they get the kids out of the house, with its wheel-bogging carpet, and knee specialists could be in for a couple of bumper years.

But the health benefits are not really the point. If it’s cool to have wheels in your shoes or an electronic gadget down your sock, kids will have them. If it was cool to have live electrodes under your toenails, kids would have them. And, for me, baseball boots will always be the best look in town.


This article first appeared in IP Review, issue 17