Q) Just going back to Christmas 1980, adidas Wimbledon, and then the adidas Forest Hills , did they prove to you that people in Liverpool were willing to pay the highest prices?
A) That Wimbledon and Grand Prix thing was a classic case of better and better. The Stan Smith thing had been incredible at £19.99, more incredible was that next step from £20 a pair to £30 a pair the following Christmas, so pre Christmas of 1980 we stepped up to selling hundreds of pairs of Grand Prix and Wimbledon which were the best tennis shoes in the world at that time. They were £35 actually, £34.99 for a pair of Grand Prix or Wimbledon. And that step up to £34.99 was probably a bit too far for our managing director Peter Black. He said, “look lets price them at £29.99 and sell volume” and that was just an incredible situation to be selling thousands of pairs of Wimbledon and Grand Prix at £29.99 when you consider that the average trainer price in the UK was £17 at that point. Even in Glasgow or wherever, certain markets trainers were still at £15. In Liverpool they were £29.99 a pair, nearly double the national average. So from there it spread wider to anything they could get. Obviously the Grand Slams came along but the Forest Hills were even more remarkable.
I’ve got a pair of the originals, (picks up shoe and shows it to camera), this was sitting in the warehouse at Peter Blacks. It was the most expensive tennis shoe in the world at that time, it had all sorts of technology with a breathable sole, the holes in the sole allowed sweat to get out but not the water in. The inner sock even moulded to the shape of the foot.
It was only targeted at the top tennis clubs, like the Queen’s tennis club. Wherever the best tennis clubs where, 30 or 40 pairs went out to them but they couldn't sell them at £40 a pair.
As soon as we put them in the Top Man in Liverpool in the Christmas of 1980, and then through to 1981 as well, it was the break through if you like, the phenomenon of selling a £40 tennis shoe at that time, which is the equivalent of selling a £150 trainer today, it was just unreal really.
The following year adidas launched the first $100 sports shoe in the world, it was called Zelda. It was made of pig’s skin. Reebok think they invented the garment leather if you like; the glove leather shoe with the leather classics and the work outs but adidas had already invented it a few years before. They didn’t sell very well, especially in America, so we ended up selling the last of the stock at Wade Smith in 1982.
This was a £50 shoe in 1982. So if you like Liverpool took it to new levels. It began to spread when I started Wade Smith, obviously I went from fifty styles to over one hundred and fifty styles of adidas shoes from all over the world in that first year. And that was my big break through if you like, from taking it from a wall of trainers, to four walls of trainers in a shop with the biggest range of fashion trainers pretty much on the planet at that time because I knew where to get stock from, Germany and France etc, with imports from Ireland and we were even bringing stuff over from the States. Anything we could get our hands on in terms of imports.
Q) Why do you think nobody else caught onto this at the time?
A) There were people around doing it, well obviously in London they started around the same time, they were doing the running shoe thing. I think JD over at Bury again was just hitting that wave in 1981/82. Obviously we had been training like hell in Top Man in the two or three years previously. So when I started Wade Smith it was like I hit the ground running really. I took it from if you like, a wall of styles to the biggest adidas ranges from all over Europe.
adidas had factories in France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, so production was coming from all over the place. So they tended to have a separate range for France, a separate range for Germany and I suppose I brought all those different ranges into the shop for the first time.
Q) Is it true that on the first day of opening, or the second day of opening the shop on Slater Street, the shop was broken into?
A) Yes that’s true. I had to learn quickly. Obviously I’d opened the shop, not even the side windows down Fleet Street were bricked up properly or roller shuttered. It was an easy take breaking into my side windows down the side street, so I don’t think we’d sold anything, I hadn’t dressed out the shop much and I was in the shop on the Saturday so we didn’t really open. And then I arrived on the Monday morning to find that half the stock had gone. There was about 30/40 burnt out matches on the floor in a pile so these lads that had broken in were trying to find more stock around my stock room. It was a bit of an amateur job but it was pretty soul destroying for me. It was the first time ever for me that I cried over a sort of crisis in my business and I guess the fact that I suffered that adversity actually on day one helped build a hell of a determination, a tenacity that I never lost from that point onwards. I had to pick myself up. Fortunately my insurance with Norwich Union was unbelievable I must say, I paid the £125 on the Friday and I was ringing them up with half my stock gone, I think it was a couple of thousand quids worth of stock that I hadn’t even paid adidas for, had been stolen. And Norwich Union paid that two thousand quid back about ten days later, in fact my bank rang me up to say I’ve had a good day. They said, “What’s this £2000 that’s landed in your bank account?” I said, “No, it’s the insurance claim”. So the bank was getting excited about the fact that I was having a good trading time.
Well, going back to the fairytale of the £800 on the second Saturday, we set a budget for the first year of twenty six thousand, and I think I was able to make about two or three thousand pounds profit from that. I didn’t pay myself a salary in the first year, Angie used to come up at lunch time to help me run the first shop from being on my own.
But the fairytale was I went to Germany two or three times before that Christmas with empty suitcases and came back, hired a van, went twice I think, bought one hundred pairs, came back, sold them, went back and bought two hundred pairs and we had done twenty seven thousand pounds worth of sales by the end of week seven by the time I had got to the Christmas period of 1982.
So I had done my first year’s budget within the first seven or eight weeks. So it was the most magic time of Wade Smith really. We did one hundred thousand in the first year, a quarter of a million the second, and so on and so forth. So it was a remarkable time.
ROBERT WADE SMITH 2009