A few years back I, along with Mark Platt of LFC.TV, visited Robert Wade-Smith at his home in Caldy on the Wirral. We spent a couple of hours in his company interviewing him on his life, from the early beginnings of working for Peter Black in Keighley to opening the Wade Smith Store on Slater Street in 1982 and through to it's demise in 2005. Here is a short excerpt from that interview.
Q) Just tell us a bit about how you got into the fashion industry initially.
A) I was lucky enough to do my training before the Wade Smith business started with a company called Peter Blacks in Yorkshire. They had won the rights to manufacture the Adidas bags in the early 70s. They were a big manufacturer for Marks and Spencer, luggage, and other goods originally but their big thing in the 70s was the success of the sports bag. The holdall, the Adidas holdall.
When I joined the factory in 1977 to do my training they were producing certainly fifty thousand bags a week. So two or three million bags a year were coming out of the factories. And with that success Peter Blacks were offered the distribution of adidas Sportswear throughout the UK, alongside Umbro who distributed adidas to the Sport Shops, whereas Peter Black distributed adidas to the Department Stores mail order business and the shoe trade, but my training was on the factory floor.
My start was actually on the adidas floor, I did about 4 or 5 different jobs in my first year from courting the adidas bag handles to putting the rivets on the bottom of the bags. I learnt the business initially in the factories. I went to the adidas warehouses the following year for a year and then they put me on a sales course and then they put me on the adidas concessions business. The adidas concessions business had 20 concessions around the UK in Top Man stores?
Q) Why do you think adidas was so special in Liverpool, what made Liverpool different?
A) Its well known the fans of Liverpool Football Club were travelling around Europe, and there would probably be at some point maybe five thousand of them, there were certainly two or three thousand regulars travelling around Europe, to places like Paris, obviously Bayern Munich, and the Italian clubs. So there was a lot of Liverpudlians travelling.
They were then introduced to the more expensive trainers, running shoes, tennis shoes in Germany and France at the time. Which adidas hadn’t been able to sell that well in the UK market. Obviously Liverpool changed all of that.
Q) Didn’t the ‘Top Shop’ store bring over any of these expensive, modern adidas, or even Peter Black?
A) I mean our range for the UK had about forty styles and once the Top Man Liverpool thing really started to ‘kick in’ it was obvious we had to start bringing in some special imports from likes of the Austrian factories, French factories, and German factories. So we began to bring in some of the top tennis shoes, obviously after the Stan Smith boom in 1979. The following year we started bringing in the Wimbledon’s, Gran Prix’s which were the thirty five pound tennis shoes that supposedly the UK market wouldn’t be able to sell.
But obviously Liverpool changed that and from there we began to expand the adidas Top Man range from say twenty styles to around forty of fifty styles.
Q) Did you have any say on that matter?
A) Well, it was slowly slowly, obviously when I started Wade Smith my big break-through was to bring the whole of the French and German top end styles in as well, so I took the UK market from maybe forty/fifty styles to one hundred styles.
We argued a lot with the management at adidas to expand the range, they thought it was a bubble that would burst and that could be damaging for adidas. Certainly adidas in Germany were very nervous about selling running shoes in Top Man stores or tennis shoes in Top Man stores when really they were supposed to be selling the leisure adidas shoes, like adidas jeans for instance, or Samba or whatever.
Obviously with the Liverpool thing, the Liverpool market created the cult for expensive designer trainers that were sold as leisure rather than sport. But adidas were always at odds with it because they didn’t want to undo their heritage for sport.
But they couldn’t stop it, once the Liverpool thing got moving, they couldn’t really stop the Liverpool boom that happened in the 1980s, which went from people owning less than a pair of these to everybody having two or three pairs in their wardrobe.
Infact in America they had a situation where so called Americans would have two pairs of trainers in their wardrobe and the Brits only had half a pair, I don’t know who was walking around with half a pair. We were supposedly miles behind but Liverpool actually at that time when the Americans were buying trainers big time, Liverpool were actually ahead of them. Everybody in Liverpool had two or three pairs of trainers in the late 70s and early 80s.
ROBERT WADE SMITH 2009