Found this on the New York Times Page. Might be interesting...
Oakley Brings Out an Unusual Sports Shoe
By JAMES STERNGOLD
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. -- To break into the intensely competitive sport shoe market, Oakley Inc. has devised several secret weapons, including an unusual black and yellow woven shoe with a motorcycle racing tire for a sole, and Shane Bonifay.
That Bonifay is 14 years old and a standout in a little-known but hip water sport called wake boarding is precisely the point, because Oakley, previously known for its sunglasses, is attempting the ultimate guerrilla marketing campaign.
To compete against the likes of Nike Inc., its nemesis, Oakley is doing an end run around the mainstream with a shoe that looks different from anything on the market, by avoiding the major sport shoe retailing chains, focusing instead on 200 or so sporting goods stores that carry its sunglasses. It will be promoting the shoes with athletes who cultivate an image, like Oakley, as rebels willing to go to any extreme to pursue their passions. In addition to Bonifay there will be Ricky Carmichael, a motorcycle racer, and Tim Curran, a young surfer.
"Our thinking is based on the idea that everything you've grown to expect from a product, we want to go outside of that box and start over and think about it new," said Jim Jannard, Oakley's rebellious founder.
Or, as Scott Bowers, a former pro skier and the company's head of sport marketing, put it: "Our core demographic is from 16 to 21 years old, and that age is impressed by opinion leaders who come from the fringe. What we do then is use that fringe and that demographic to attract the mainstream market, which regards those younger people as having a certain credibility."
In other words, Oakley hopes that aging baby boomers, the people most willing to shell out $125 for new shoes, will want to buy a product regarded as hip by surfer dudes.
Oakley will introduce for the public Tuesday its new, high-technology sport shoe, and it is working hard to propel the product forward not with a standard advertising blitz but with buzz. The shoe, which has been kept secret until now, is an attempt to do in the shoe market what Oakley's sunglasses did in that market: create a niche by using high technology and a high-technology look.
The shoe begins with its sole. It is manufactured from an all-synthetic black material that is strong, unusually light and, the company contends, far more skid resistant than conventional soles. (The grooving is modeled on motorcycle racing tires.) The uppers are produced from a synthetic fabric woven out of yellow strands of Kevlar and black strands of something the company calls "O matter," making them strong but flexible.
Jannard was especially proud that the shoe would even have new kinds of laces -- they are elliptical rather than round or flat because, he said, that way they will not untie. "The conventional companies just did not think of looking at that," he said. "We did."
To say that Oakley cultivates the notion that it does business with attitude would be a gross understatement. Its new headquarters building here not only looks like a high-technology, steel-encrusted palace of some malevolent warlord, it actually sports a skull and crossbones banner on the roof and has seats from a B-52 bomber, as well as a bomb (presumably deactivated) in the lobby.
Oakley is taking a risk that has left analysts skeptical but generally eager. The company experienced explosive growth in its sunglasses business for a number of years, then ran into a market slowdown last year. Its sales slumped for the first time, and it struggled to recover. Oakley appears to be growing again this year with a number of new products, including its new Racing Jacket, Mars and Minute lines.
Most analysts have said they are counting on little in sales of the shoes this year, particularly because that market has been sluggish; the shoes will go on sale in June. If they take off, the revenues will be pure gravy, analysts said.
If Oakley is crushed by its much larger sport shoe rivals it would be a blow, but it would not affect its core sunglasses business. Either way, Oakley will have done it its own way.
The shoes will be manufactured here, rather than overseas. And, Jannard promised, more products will be coming. His designers were fiddling with a new kind of golf bag in the design shop here. A second shoe, all black, is being planned. Jannard said he was even considering some kind of communications device and musical instruments.
But for now, he insisted, the battle is not just with Nike and the other shoe companies, but with conventional thinking. "I think we're in a clash of ideologies right now," he said. "That's what this is really all about."
Tuesday, May 12, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
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