Skins Footwear is a revolutionary two-part, footwear structure consisting of an outer collapsible “Skin” and an inner support section called the “Bone.” The design allows consumers to purchase one inner Bone and numerous outer Skins, resulting in multiple style variations from one pair of shoes, with the same feel and fit no matter what Skin he or she wears.

“Given the nature of this innovation, people have been talking about Skins for over a year, and the demand is such that we needed to create a pre-launch outlet,” explained Isack Fadlon, co-owner of Sportie LA.

In March of this year, Skins Footwear announced an alliance with SLAM (Sportie LA Media), the media marketing division of Sportie LA. SLAM provides nontraditional marketing and consulting for select brands. SLAM’s first effort under the arrangement with Skins was a partnership for the brand with GenArt to host the March 5th closing night of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Skin Bones exhibit.

With four stores in the Los Angeles area, and a clientele that reads like a Who’s Who of fashion-conscious celebrities, Sportie LA is considered one of the chief influencers on today’s sneaker scene. This past November, the company was listed #3 among Independent Retailers on Footwear News’ Power 100.

WALDOBORO, Maine - With more Americans planting their feet in throwaway shoes and athletic footwear, the neighborhood shoe repair shop might seem like a relic from the past and a candidate for extinction.

But don’t tell that to Bill Wheeler. He entered the business four months ago at age 56, pumping new life into a collection of machines and hand tools that he purchased through eBay from a defunct repair shop.

The opening of Coastal Cobbler, sandwiched between an appliance business and a cellular phone office, means Waldoboro’s 5,000 residents no longer have to travel 35 miles to Brunswick or 50 miles to Lewiston for shoe repairs.

It also bucks a decades-long decline in the number of repair shops. While cities still support multiple repair shops, many towns have none.

The number of cobblers has dropped from roughly 100,000 during the Great Depression to about 7,000 today, according to the Shoe Service Institute of America.

And the trend continues.

For every repair shop that opens, two or three are closing their doors, but the rate of attrition appears to be slowing, said Jim McFarland, who serves on the board of the Shoe Service Institute, an industry trade group staffed by volunteers.

“By 2020, unless we see a radical change, there will be around 5,000 or 6,000 shops,” said Mr. McFarland, who operates a shop in Lakeland, Fla.

The cause of the decline is plain to see.

Last year’s average retail price of a dress shoe - men’s, women’s and children’s - was $32.59, according to the NPD Group Inc., a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y. Dress casual shoes were even cheaper, averaging $30.46 a pair.

That’s considerably less than the $40 to $45 that most shops charge to put on a set of half soles and heels.

Also, dressier shoes make up a dwindling percentage of footwear sales. Last year, dress and dress casual shoe sales were $10.7 billion, roughly half of what Americans paid for sneakers and other athletic footwear.

Many of today’s consumers have no familiarity with repair shops, and some are unaware that old shoes can be made as good as new, Mr. McFarland said. He cited estimates that only 10 percent of Americans have their shoes repaired.

Despite those worrisome figures, Mr. Wheeler decided to take the plunge. Skilled in the use of tools and machinery, the former shoe factory worker liked the idea of a trade that enables him to extend the life of a product that would otherwise be discarded.

“In a throwaway society, this is a really valuable thing,” he said. “It does something for the environment, maybe make a bit of an impact.”

Shoe repair has traditionally been a father-and-son business, in many cases begun by immigrants. Mr. McFarland, for example, stitched his first full sole when he was 16 and now runs the business his grandfather started.

But these days, fewer sons are following their fathers into the business.

In Mr. Wheeler’s shop, the rates for full soles and heels are $70, half soles and heels $45, heels $21 and women’s high heel lifts $12.

So far, he said, the customer response has been enough to keep him busy. Gunilla Broman of Friendship was delighted to learn that she could get her shoes repaired without having to travel to Brunswick.

“A lot of people don’t repair their shoes, but I do,” she said.

(c) 2007 Augusta Chronicle, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

This aptly comes as a time when large sporting goods companies, who had been sitting on the sidelines quietly, watching this industry grow, are now coming in with the intentions to take substantial market share away from those that built this industry.

With sporting goods companies like Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, among others, now making such a strong push into the board sports industry, Consolidated feels the urgency to take action more than ever. As Steve “Birdo” Guisinger states, “There is a reason there are no football, basketball, baseball, or soccer player-owned companies…and there should be. Don’t let this happen to surf, skate, and snow. Your decisions shape the future and we encourage you to be conscious of what you support.”

This footwear line comes on the heels of introducing “The Level Playing Field.” The crux of this theory questions volume discounting given to the corporate mall and sporting goods chains, which comes at the expense of the smaller, “Mom and Pop” shops, which are the backbone of this industry. Consolidated feels the pricing structure is backwards, and that by putting “too many eggs in one basket,” manufacturers are forfeiting control of their distribution to the retail sector. Consolidated argues the need to break out of this paradigm in order to foster a healthier, more competitive distribution channel, as well as to help out the core board shops.

To help compete against these corporate mall and sporting goods chains, Consolidated encourages skateboarders to start their own shop, even if it’s out of their own garage or trunk of a car. They have a link posted on their site to help facilitate this process.

For more information regarding this campaign, here is a link to a recent interview: www.consolidatedskateboard.com/birdo.interview.php.

Look for Consolidated Footwear in a core skate, surf, snowboard shop…or the trunk of a car, near you.

For more information, visit: www.consolidatedskateboard.com and www.myspace.com/dontdoitarmy.

STEP ASIDE, Birkenstock. Now there’s something fabulous.

Environmentally conscious brands such as Simple, Terra Plana and Charmone are churning out trendy tennies, sexy sandals and gorgeous, Carrie Bradshaw-worthy heels in the $50 to $300 range.

It’s about time. The eco-fashion craze has delivered baby-soft bamboo washcloths and runway-quality organic cotton dresses. Footwear, it seems, is the last frontier. Now, you don’t have to sacrifice your aesthetics for your ethics, says Zem Joaquin, founder of the San Francisco-based Ecofabulous.com, a site devoted to great design that’s good for the planet.

“In terms of the way they look, there isn’t even a drastic difference between the shoes I would traditionally purchase and the shoes of this modern eco-movement,” says Joaquin, who wears heels from Charmone’s Spice Collection.

The difference is how they’re made. Thanks to Birkenstock, designers know that cork, from the cork tree, makes a soft foot bed; and jute, a natural fiber from a shrub, produces fine upper material.

But new shoes from Simple use crepe, a natural rubber tapped from the hevea tree, for their squishy outsoles, in addition to bamboo and nontoxic, water-based glues.

All of the Santa Barbara company’s shoes have some level of sustainability. But the Green Toes line is almost all cradle-to- cradle, meaning that the Earth’s resources are used and then returned to the Earth, as opposed to the synthetics packing landfills. You’ll find car tires in canvas sandals, and wool-based felt in loafers. Come July, you’ll see laces made out of recycled plastic bottles.

“It’s like developing technology, so when we figure out these new innovations we go back and try to implement them into our older products,” says Greg Nielsen, a spokesman for Simple.

Natural materials such as bamboo, which is anti-microbial and a perfect insole, and hemp have long been abundantly available.

Blackspot Shoes uses the latter in its classic sneaker, a dead ringer for Converse All-Stars; and the Unswoosher, a boot. The shoes are made from a biodegradable, vegetarian leather in a safe, unionized factory. Even the logo is hand-drawn.

“We’re in a new wave of business that has to do with being local, ecological, ethical and, most of all, a new kind of cool,” says Kalle Lasn, founder of the Vancouver-based company. “It’s not a mega- corporate, top-down, bogus, inauthentic cool. More and more people want a bottom-up kind of cool.”

But even the most corporate of shoe companies has taken steps toward sustainability.

The Nike Considered Collection features hip sneakers made from organic cotton and reductions in toxic agents found in rubbers, plastics and adhesives.

Nike’s waste elimination program, Reuse-A-Shoe, uses rubber from old outsoles in golf products and running tracks; foam from midsoles goes into playground surfacing; and upper fabric is used for padding under basketball courts.

A Nike representative could not be reached for comment. But Joaquin swears by the shoes.

“I like the Nike Considereds more, aesthetically, than the Simples,” she says. “Even my hippest male friends wear them.”

Even more hip, perhaps, are fashion-forward women, who can spot Christian Louboutin knock-offs from across a cocktail party. There’s something eco-friendly and cruelty-free for them, too.

New York-based Terra Plana makes bright, flirty and feminine shoes from recycled materials — quilts, coffee bags, parachutes, car seats — sourced near their factories. The shoes are sturdy yet light, consuming less energy and making them easier to ship.

Instead of chrome tanning, which can be carcinogenic, the leather is dyed with vegetable extracts, which often produce richer, deeper colors, Joaquin says, and also spare the lives of leather tanners in China and Italy.

“Tanning is so toxic that the average life expectancy of those who do it is 35,” she says.

San Diego-based Charmone not only strays from tanning, but also from animal skins in general.

The European-designed, eco-couture shoes are made from Italian microfibers. The synthetic microfiber process is actually less polluting to the environment than tanning, factory farming and processing leather, says founder Jodi Koskella.

In addition, the shoes are made with water-based glues, nickel- free hardware and are free from harmful polyvinyl chlorides, those lovely plastics that can produce dioxin as a byproduct. Exposure to dioxin has been linked to reproductive disorders and a variety of cancers.

Instead of PVC, Charmone shoes are made using a light polyurethane coating.

Koskella, a former Silicon Valley-ite, says the company started two years ago when a stylish vegan friend complained that all nonleather shoes were either ugly or poor in quality.

“This was an issue that the fashion world was not facing as people were becoming more socially aware,” she says. “There was a misconception that if you care about animals and the environment, you’re a hippie.”

Clearly, Koskella says, that’s not the case anymore.

“You can be a fashionista and be green,” she says. “It’s no longer a fringe movement.”

Contract Jessica Yadegaran at

jyadegaran@cctimes.com or (925) 943-8155.

(c) 2007 Oakland Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Apr. 10–Joseph Lybarger of Greeley sat down on the brightly colored mat to try on a pair of sneakers. He looked puzzled at the blue-and-yellow striped shoe.

It was about 10 sizes too big for the 2-year-old, but he tried it on anyway.

He was among about a half-dozen kids who visited the last day of Museum Mondays at the Greeley History Museum, 714 8th St.

Lybarger, along with two of his play pals, Mirabelle Adams and Clara Lindahl, both 3, tried on different sized and shaped shoes.

A pair of goulashes, red and black sparkled high heels, tennis shoes, slippers, sandals and more filled a couple of wicker baskets sitting on the museum floor. Mirabelle and Clara weren’t shy at all in trying all the activities. The girls hustled from one activity to another, coloring, cutting, gluing and creating with Play-Doh. Eventually, they got up and sat patiently next to the compact disc player listening to songs from Thomas the Tank Engine.

Jazzlyn Jensen, 4, of Greeley tried on a pair of the red high heels before she sat down to color.

“I was like that tall,” she said with her hand over her head. “My mom lets me play with her shoes.”

Jazzlyn was dressed in a pink Barbie sweatshirt, pink framed eyeglasses and was coloring a pair of heels pink, purple and green.

Joseph sat on the floor, playing with the colored shoe laces, looking up every once in a while to see what else there was for him to do. He pushed the laces through the eyelets one by one before he decided that the lace his little brother, Ricky, 1, was playing with was better than the one he had in his hands.

“Shoooeess,” Joseph said with excitement.

“Yes, shoes,” said his mother, Amanda, as she signed the word.

Joseph, who was slow at learning to speak, has learned several words in sign language to help him communicate. His quiet nature kept him close to his mother throughout the exhibit.

But for 4-year-old Danielle White of Greeley, cutting out a shoe pattern and pasting foam shapes on was the highlight of her day. Four patterns lay on the tables, high heels, boots, elves slippers and sandals.

“I’m going to pick these,” she said as she reached for the high heels. “I like these.”

She cut on the lines, pasted the shape to another piece of construction paper and started to color it every color possible. First was the blue, green, pink and purple.

“Whatcha making? Oh, some high heels? Cinderella slippers?” said her mother, Suzanne White as she looked over her daughter. “Everything’s colorful with her, even her socks.”

Danielle had a pair of striped blue, pink, purple and yellow socks on her feet. She picked out the socks but didn’t pick out the pair of black maryjane shoes she was wearing on Monday.

“My mom got my shoes ’cause I couldn’t find them, ” she said while coloring. “They’re not hard but this one has a buckle on them.”

After she was done creating, she and her friend, Jazzlyn, took their four masterpieces and laid them down on the front of the stroller.

“We’re gonna have a huge collection of shoes now,” said White as she pushed the stroller into the hallway. “Let’s go see what else is here at the museum.”

And the pitter-patter of the girls’ feet followed closely behind.

About the exhibit

The specialty exhibit, The Best Feet Forward, showed shoes dating back to the 1800s, will be on display through May 20.

Shoes on hand were museum collectibles as well as shoes from one of the longer standing downtown stores, Florio’s.

—–

Copyright (c) 2007, Greeley Tribune, Colo.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

Apr. 1–ARLINGTON — It’s easy to take shoes for granted.

Unless you don’t have any.

So in November, students at St. Alban’s Episcopal School launched Shoes to Share, a campaign to collect gently worn shoes for less-fortunate children and donate them to Mission Arlington.

“We had heard that some people didn’t have shoes,” said Lauren Smedley, 10, a fifth-grader who collected 30 pairs for the cause.

The 260-student school set a goal of 500 pairs.

On Friday, however, the students delivered their 1,000th pair, and now they aim to collect at least 600 more.

“Community service is at the heart of our school,” Head of School Kathy Bonds said. “This is a great project, and the kids are really enjoying it.”

Tobi Jackson, a mom who helped organize the drive, said it started with talk about the students taking on a community-improvement project. “First they started with their own shoes,” she said. “Then they got some from parents and neighbors.”

Then a neighborhood association spread word about the drive in its newsletters.

“Now we have shoes coming in from out of state,” Jackson said. Most are used, but some are new.

She said that they deliver the shoes to the mission every couple of weeks and that every time they return, the shelves are empty.

“We’re pretty excited about this,” said Tillie Burgin, executive director of Mission Arlington. “Shoes are pretty important, particularly if you don’t have any.”

She said the demand is strong for good shoes, and not just for children’s. Adult-size dress shoes and work boots are also needed.

With a $500 grant from the Meadows Foundation of Dallas and $300 from the Arlington Alliance for Youth, the students bought shoelaces, gel insoles and shoe polish.

With their parents’ help, they clean the shoes as needed before taking them to the mission.

IN THE KNOW

To help

Anyone can drop off gently worn shoes at Mission Arlington, 210 W. South St., or at St. Alban’s, 5200 S. Bowen Road.

——

Paul Bourgeois, 817-548-5412 pbourgeois@star-telegram.com

—–

Copyright (c) 2007, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

Q:WHAT IS the difference between running and walking shoes?

How do you choose a good shoe and/or the right shoe?

A: The human foot is a structural wonder. It not only balances the entire body over a comparatively small surface but also allows us to climb, walk, run, jump, skip, hop, and so forth. Mechanical engineer Edward Glaser was so enamored by the human foot that he became a podiatric surgeon. “It’s ingenious,” says Glaser. “As a machine, it is an engineering marvel.”

Today he is the founder and president of Sole Supports, a company that designs orthotics for other podiatrists to use in their practices.

Glaser believes most foot problems develop because the shoes we wear do not properly accommodate our feet. So, choosing the right athletic shoe is about more than the latest hot style, coolest colors or who designs or endorses them.

Blisters, bunions, corns, plantar fasciitis, hammertoes, heel spurs and stress fractures can all be avoided, eliminated and ameliorated with proper footwear (all bets are off for those of you who insist on wearing pointy-toed, high-heeled shoes).

First, determine if your shoes are better off in the trash than on your feet. Are there cracks in the soles or are the soles worn down? Do your feet hurt after exercising in them? Shoes are usually “toast” after about 600 miles of use.

Next, look at the soles of your shoes. If they are more worn on the inside, that means you are a pronator, with a low or flat arch that causes your feet to roll inward. If the soles are worn on the outer edge, you are a supinator, with a high arch causing your feet to roll outward.

Pronators need support in the midfoot; supinators require extra cushioning mid-arch and need more heel stabilization.

Runners and joggers have to pay particular attention to cushioning for shock absorption and flexibility in the toe area. Walkers, on the other hand, need more cushioning in the heel with more rigidity in the toe area. However, walkers who participate in long marathon walks (such as those sponsored by Avon, Susan B. Komen Foundation, etc.) often find the running shoe to be more comfortable.

A popular hybrid shoe is called a “cross trainer.” This

shoe has features that allow general participation in more than one activity, such as toe area flexibility for running, lateral stability for tennis and aerobic classes, and heel cushioning and mid-arch support for walking and weight lifting. This shoe is great for general activity, but the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society does not recommend them if you participate in any particular sport extensively.

A sport-specific shoe is always best.

Robin Brett Parnes, whose degrees include a master of public health from Boston University and a master of science in nutrition communication from Tufts University, recommends shoe shopping at the end of the day or right after a workout so your feet are at their largest. Be sure to wear the same socks used in the activity.

“Shoes fit properly when there is a firm grip of the shoe to your heel, you can wiggle all your toes and the shoes do not feel too tight or too lose.”

Correction

Last Monday’s Body Language column incorrectly listed the university affiliation of Dr. Chantal Vella. Vella is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Linda Buch is a certified personal trainer. She will answer fitness questions in her column, but not individually. Send questions to Body Language, Bay Area Living, 4770 Willow Road, Pleasanton, CA 94588 or e-mail ljbalance@aol.com.

(c) 2007 Oakland Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.