Q) When was Wade Smith’s peak of selling trainers?
A) Our peak trainer year was 1984-85. I think we did over half a million pound in sales in a back street shop in Liverpool. I seem to remember paying my whole years rent on Easter Saturday in 1984 which was an incredible thing. If you can imagine doing ten thousand pounds a week selling trainers out of a back street shop in 1984, it was a remarkable time. I mean I had been earning about four or five thousand a year as a rep for adidas but I think within three years by the time I was 23/24 we were making more than one hundred thousand net out of one back street shop. So that was the vintage year if you like, 1984/85. It was the last vintage year for the cult and after that it became mainstream and it spread across the UK and the rest of the world really and Nike and Reebok helped to stretch it into mainstream business really.
Q) You talk about 1985 being the peak year, and then the old trainer phenomenon became mass market, did you notice a change in the Liverpudlian’s attitude then? Were they not as keen to buy what everybody else was wearing?
The Reebok thing was a joint Liverpool and Manchester thing. Obviously Liverpool were way ahead of the rest of the UK but by about the beginning of 1981 Manchester began to follow very close behind. In-fact the big cult of the leisure shoe which adidas had was the Tenerife, Palermo, Korsika, which was quite an ugly German made leisure shoe but it became cult because Kickers was an ugly shoe and had this thing. The adidas leisure range was unbelievable in 1981-82. It was probably the reason why I set up Wade Smith. And Manchester followed soon after that. Obviously there was a competitive thing going on between the Mancs and the Scousers and forever more the Liverpudlians were wanting to move onto the next thing.
By the time I started and went onto the Trimm Trab thing which wasn’t actually something that happened in Manchester until a little bit later. The Gallagher brothers would tell you it was Manchester doing the Gazelle thing, suede Gazelle, where as the Scousers were doing the Trimm Trab thing and the Grand Slams. As the years went by in the 80s it moved across into top running shoes which we had a massive year with in 1984-85 with a shoe called Marathon TR which had the adidas logo on the sole. That had been around since the late 70s as the best running shoe in the world supposedly, but didn’t sell. A few years later I found three thousand pairs in Ireland of all places. I bought every pair for almost a tenner a pair, I shouldn’t say this but we basically nicked them off the Irish distributor, he had been sitting on them for three years in his warehouses in Cork. Michael O’Connor, a lovely guy, and I think I bought five hundred pairs and came back for the rest. Fifteen quid a pair to start with, we bought the two thousand pairs at ten pounds a pair. That was the last big cult adidas trainer. And I sold three thousand pairs at thirty five pounds a pair in one shop. I think that must be a record in the world for any one shop to sell such an amount. I mean who sells three thousand pairs of one style?
But after that it began to spread, obviously the Reebok workout thing came along and JD in Manchester and the Manchester thing picked up on the Reebok classics at exactly the same time as Liverpool. And then there wasn’t much to choose from with the Reebok boom that went on in 1985/86. Then the Nike thing started to hit. And if you like that started to change and I think the Liverpudlians got fed up with the whole thing and it then changed to the Timberland cult which started to happen in the late 80s. The Scousers were buying Timberlands in 1986/87, again probably three years before the rest of the UK. But before that there had been a massive thing if you remember the adidas treckers, or trecking as it was called, and that came in about four or five colours. That was a hiking boot at fifty quid a pair, which was a ridiculous boot to be walking around Liverpool in. It was a move towards the hiker boom again four years before Fila came along. Reebok did a.. Was it the Rugged Walker? as a fashion hiking shoe and that created a trend away from the trainer towards a leisure more cleated sole thing which Timberlands obviously had. The adidas hikers and the rugged walkers, then the Fila hiker came later. And that then changed the whole thing and began to spread the business and that’s why I went into the leisure shoe business, the Timberland, the Rockport, and then obviously the shoe business full on.
Through the 80s, again the Liverpudlians created a massive boom for the jeans wear labels. It went from selling Sergio Tacchini and Fila tracksuits and Lacoste in the early 80s, to then Liverpudlians going into Fiorruci which again had been happening big time in the late 70s in Italy, Chevignon in France, big jeans wear brands, Chipie, Diesel, they were all beginning to develop and Liverpudlians were three or four years ahead of the market. Out of that came the Calvin Klein, well actually Ralph Lauren first and obviously Emporio Armani. The Emporio Armani, or if you like the Armani jeans thing came on the back of the French and the Italian jeans wear labels so again the Liverpudlians were moving to expensive jeans wear labels three, four, five years ahead of the rest of the UK.
Q) When did you start with the clothing?
A) We realised that by the time we had opened up ten trainers stores around the North of England by 1988. In fact by January 1988 I decided to get out of selling from the other shoe shops because my two Liverpool shops made all of the profit, I think we made in the last three months of 1987, one hundred and fifty thousand pounds contribution from the Liverpool shops but only to lose money in Birmingham, Leicester, Sheffield. Other people like JD and All Sports, JJB, and Olympus, had opened shops in those cities, and by the time I got there I wasn’t that different.
The micro-market of Liverpool was still a one off. So I got my fingers burnt opening shops elsewhere. So in the January of 1988 Neil Cowan gave me my accounts on the 2nd of each month as always and from that moment onwards I realised we had to get rid of the shops, which I sold to ‘Sock Shop’ and ‘Body Shop’ who were all paying stupid money for prime sights. I knew I would go bust if I continued to over shop by competing. I remember bidding for a shop in Sheffield thirty thousand pounds premium just to get the keys for a lease just to rent the shop. Ratners bid one hundred thousand pounds on the same day which put everybody out of the market. I knew the game was up for opening shops as we couldn’t compete with those guys. So quite smartly we sold off all of our shoe shops. I had basically said to him I wanted to open a mini department store, buy a big freehold on Matthew Street and sell off the shoe shops. Neil just said to me, “what do you mean? we are just going to do a complete U-turn and get out of the trainer stores and open a department store?” So I responded with, “I think we just have to have one fantastic store in Liverpool and lets get out of everywhere else.” To which he said in his Yorkshire style, “You do realise this is going to bust us if it doesn’t work.” And it was a big risk and we agreed what we were going to do and so we went off looking for a freehold property and fortunately found that wonderful building on Matthew Street that became the mini department store that we created throughout the 90s. Luckily enough we sold all of the trainer stores in 1988. It took a bit of time and It was my first loss that I had made, which hurt quite hard but at least it transformed Wade Smith from then going into the jeans wear labels. We were the first to sign up Armani jeans, and then Ralph Lauren and eventually the likes of Calvin Klein came along and much later on obviously the Prada’s, Gucci’s, and the top Italian brands as well. The Wade Smith mini department store became a huge success throughout the 90s.
ROBERT WADE SMITH 2009