Q) What was it about adidas back then? Were there any other brands?
A) If you’re talking about adidas then Adi Dassler who founded Adidas was an incredible guy who innovated the whole sports shoe industry. And it’s well known that his brother Rudolf Dassler founded Puma. They built this incredible business out of Herzogenaurach in Germany and together they really innovated the modern development of the sports shoe. Adi’s son Horst Dassler was an incredible character too. He was the marketing guru if you like, the genius that got adidas the best advertising boards behind the goals in the early 60s which eventually advertised the adidas three stripes. They were so recognisable even on black and white television, well even more so on black and white television.
But to be fair to Adi Dassler he was a genius in terms of recognising the development of a sports shoe from a basic training shoe or basic football boot into something more technical. The technical development in sports shoes was really innovated completely by adidas, particularly through the early 60s and 70s.
The pinnacle of adidas was I guess the running shoe boom and the tennis shoe thing of the late 70s and early 80s. Then of course, Nike came along in the late 70s with a basic running shoe for the jogging boom in America, which then started to give adidas a run for their money.
adidas did get complacent. Sadly the son of adidas, Horst Dassler died in 1985 and actually the management at adidas lost a lot of direction after that. adidas changed the hubris setting in the late 80s and they were completely beaten up by Nike and Reebok in the late 80s and 90s. adidas lost ten years between 1985-95 but they came back strongly and I still think that adidas will eventually get back to being number one in the world. I think they are the originators of the whole business so they deserve that.
Q) I just wanted to ask you about Wade Smith’s Slater Street store. Was it specifically that area you were looking at?
A) Well I was hoping to get someone to back me including my own father who was pretty ruthless in reading me the riot act about starting a business. He always felt if you are going to start your own business you should start it yourself. So he was very anti “thanks dad”. He kept quoting me parables about how Ken Morrison had built up the Morrison’s business and that it was his mother and father who were the original Morrison’s, Hilda and Fred Morrison founded the company, they started from a market store in Bradford market, and they ran that store for thirty bloody years before they were able to open their own supermarket. So my dad was very much ‘if you’re going to do it then get a backstreet shop, live above it and do it yourself. Why would you want me to back you, if I’m backing you then it is my business then’. So he was pretty hard on me and the last phone call I had with him was, ‘listen mate, I’m not going to tell you. You’ve asked me about ten times in the last two years I’m not going to back the idea of opening a shoe shop. There are 2000 shoe shops going bust right now (early 1979 or 1982 or whatever) and there is no way I would put money into opening another shoe shop in Britain and as for opening a shoe shop in Liverpool that has already gone bust, you must be f’ing crazy’. And he slammed the phone down on me and I never spoke to him for about six to eight months so I had to start that business. I had to get a friend of mine to help me find some money. He became my business partner, a guy called Neil Cowan. He was an accountant and helped me get the business started.
We literally started with that £500. He helped to secure the original overdraft and we basically started from nothing. And that is the way to start. You know its better to start from scratch if you are building a business rather than getting a handout. If you get a handout then you can quickly squander it. The fact that we had to learn the hard way, the shop got broken into, we had to go off to Germany to buy thirty pairs first and then sell them, buy eighty pairs and sell them, and then go back and buy one hundred and twenty pairs. So buying and selling, buying and selling was the magic to accumulating the business. And I think, to this day, if the business is any good it should be able to fund itself. I wish we had actually funded Wade Smith all long ourselves but you become ambitious, you want to grow the thing which inevitably gets the banks involved. You become a hostage. I mean a Barclay’s director recently said to me, “Why would you want to become a hostage to a bank?” But you are, and when you are growing like we did, I think we did a million pound turnover in year four, and then two, four, six, ten million so on and so forth and obviously the bit in the middle about moving the trainer store to Matthew Street and the way the business grew came a bit later. But I think its always best to build a business out of your own money rather than borrowing too much money from the bank.
Q) These guys who were bringing in the trainers in the very early days of Slater Street, did they bring in any Fila or Tacchini (I think that’s what he says, audio low on questions) then?
A) Those lads brilliantly made a living for themselves out of a lot of boot legging really and there wasn’t just half a dozen of them, there were a good couple of hundred, or maybe even a few thousand of them that were trading gear. That did cross over with Wade Smith. I never actually bought anything. I only bought those twenty five pairs from those lads that was at the very start of it and I then went off buying direct from the retailers in Germany. But those lads were always making a decent living for themselves with the Fila tracksuits, the Sergio Tacchini thing, the Lacoste thing, it went on for years really. It still goes on now. Not with those brands but.. you know.
Q) When you look back at the peak years between the late 70s & early 80s, do you think that is a period that is overlooked in terms of British fashion, the casuals?
A) Well I think the casuals went on a lot longer than anyone actually realised. It went on for a good 10/15 years in a way. But it was born out of the late 70s and out of that the Fila, Sergio Tacchini and Lacoste which was the casual thing of the late 70s and early 80s.
I think it was the Face Magazine wasn’t it? That wrote that article about 1983/84 and coined the ‘Casuals’ expression. And I suppose the designer jeans, the Chevignon’s, Fiorucci’s, Chipie’s, and Diesel’s were a part of a Casuals thing as well. But the true Casuals I suppose were Designer Sportswear. But it did go into Designer wear labels later in the 90s to top end Italian labels. So became far-reaching.
ROBERT WADE SMITH 2009