WASHINGTON - Hail to the flip-flop, the best-selling footwear in the history of the world.

Talk about classic design: The flip-flop is so classic that there’s an Egyptian hieroglyph for it - a long oval with an inverted V in just the right place. King Tutankhamen’s tomb has prototypic flip-flops in it.

Whether they’re high-end Rainbows or brandless Chinese imports, slipping into a pair can signal a beach in the offing or downtime in the dorm. But the basic flat sole with a Y-shaped strap, joined between the first and second toes, is also a historical consumer good.

“The guy who owns a mansion wears them and the guy that cleans his swimming pool wears them, too,” says Fernando Tigre, the former president of Alpargatas SA, maker of the popular Brazilian flip- flop Havaianas.

For millions of third-world buyers, flip-flops are their first footwear. Often they’re the first step in upward mobility toward closed-toe shoes, according to Sonja Bata, whose Toronto-based company, Bata Shoe Organization, operates factories that make basic shoes in 26 countries.

In fact, flip-flops have been credited with fostering economic growth.

The production of rubber-soled versions, which had begun in Kobe, Japan, in the 1930s, stoked Japan’s recovery after World War II, technology historian Edward Tenner wrote in his book “Our Own Devices.”

Cutting and assembling them took so little capital, machinery and expertise - and they were in such demand - that many Japanese families and entrepreneurs got back on their feet making flip- flops.

Mitsubishi, the Japanese conglomerate, bought out many of those businesses and became a big early exporter of flip-flops, according to Phillip Nutt, a Toronto-based shoe industry consultant.

Chasing lower wages, Japan’s footwear companies moved production to Taiwan and Korea in the ’60s and ’70s and ultimately to China. Along the way, most transitioned into more profitable closed-toe shoes and then athletic shoes.

At one stage or another in this still-continuing process, assembling flip-flops became a backyard occupation for “hundreds of thousands of families in Asia and Africa,” according to Bata, who’s been in the business since the 1940s.

Easy to make, easy to fit, simple and cheap, flip-flops have been virtually unchanged for more than 70 years, though not unchallenged within the sandal category.

The U.S. Patent Office library catalogs sandals with toe guards and sandals that float. Sandals with air cushions and sandals with slots for insertable coolants.

Even sandals with drain holes, laced uppers and compartments you can put keys in. But the unpatented old-fashioned flip-flop rules.

Nutt, who’s worked with flip-flops since the ’60s, estimates total worldwide sales in the flip-flop category at 20 billion. By comparison, sales of all athletic shoes, everything from cross- trainers and cleats to tennis and running shoes, total 17.8 billion, according to Mike May, spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.

Flip-flops, while not very profitable, are a way for manufacturers to gain a foothold in athletic shoes, said Donald Kalfin, the president of New York-based Sino-East International Ltd., a longtime Asian shoe marketer.

It’s hard to lose on flip-flops, he added, because as a consumer product, they’re the ultimate perennial: “If population grows, sales grow.”

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New owner Adidas-Salomon AG wants Reebok International to reclaim the turf that first put its sneakers on the feet of millions of consumers.

The Canton sporting goods company is retraining its focus on the performance side of its athletic footwear business.

Reebok neglected the unit in recent years at the expense of a fashion push that put its product development and marketing might behind lifestyle sneakers and hip-hop and rap star endorsers.

“What we refined over the past six months since we’ve gone through the merger with Adidas is our brand positioning,” Reebok president and CEO Paul Harrington said. “We’re going to ground Reebok in performance sports. We need to allocate more of our spending and more of our product development to performance.”

While Harrington said he and former Reebok CEO and founder Paul Fireman looked at returning Reebok to its performance heritage last year, he acknowledged the strategy was accelerated by Adidas after its $3.8 billion acquisition of the company in January.

Adidas CEO Herbert Heiner this month said Reebok “forgot” that its core business was sports when it branched into the entertainment business. He named an Adidas point man, Uli Becker, to head Reebok’s global marketing and help resuscitate demand.

But the company will continue to work with rappers such as 50 Cent and Jay Z.

“We clearly are still going to be in the entertainment business - that’s a category that Reebok created in the industry,” Harrington said. “But what I think we’ll do is broaden the consumer appeal. We’re not just going to be confined to rap.”

Reebok started seeing a decline in it market share last fall, but it really hit home in the current spring selling season, said John Shanley, a Susquehanna International Group analyst.

“They dropped 6 full percentage points in market share in the past six months,” he said. “Normally you see somebody gain or lose a half of 1 percent or 1 percent. It’s really unprecedented.”

Shanley blames the decline foremost on Reebok’s “less than exciting” styling, although retailers’ anxiety about Adidas’ plans for Reebok also stifled orders until the deal was sealed. There was an overall U.S. and U.K. fashion shift away from classic white athletic footwear - which has been the mainstay of Reebok’s product lines - to Euro-styled shoes and brands such as Puma, Skechers and Converse.

“The Adidas guys recognize that, and they’re putting a great deal of attention into the way the brand looks,” Shanley said. “That should be evident in the tail-end of this year and for spring (2007).”

Reebok recently named Michael Schaeffer, who joined the company from Puma last year, as its new creative director/head of design.

Reebok’s key growth areas in the next several years will be running, basketball, women’s performance and lifestyle, sports licensing with the NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball, and overall branded apparel.

Two performance technology products that’ll be heavily promoted are a Kinetic Fit System running shoe launching in July, and the Answer X pump basketball shoe hitting stores in November.

Reebok also is revamping its distribution, putting a renewed focus on sporting good stores. To drive up demand, it’s pulling back on marquee products such as Reebok Classics that in the past may have been over-distributed.

“What gives your brand buzz is to have some scarcity of the product,” said John Horan, publisher of Sporting Goods Intelligence, a trade publication. “You want it to be priced high and sell fast, and you want the market to be hungry for more.”

- dgoodison@bostonherald.com

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IT’S getting perilously close to flip-flop weather. This means having my winter boots surgically removed and baring my feet to the world.

Instead of the usual preparations - pedicures and ferocious foot- filing - I chose a more technical approach this year, booking an appointment with podiatrist John Guthrie. But he’s not interested in what colour of polish you plan for your toes. No, he’s here to look at your bones, joints, muscles and tendons.

Your feet are involved in everything you do, and how you walk affects the muscles and joints from your toes to the top of your spine.

It’s useful to take a pair of shorts with you, as John needs to look at your full range of movement, from how you wiggle your toes to how your hips move in their sockets. He’ll ask you to walk up and down the room, with shoes and without, in order to assess your flexibility.

Podiatrists can spot a multitude of problems, from damaged vertebrae to impaired metatarsal joints and even diabetes. Many problems can be resolved through exercise, but John also makes orthotic insoles that can correct the way you walk. While he hasn’t made my feet any more attractive for summer sandals, the calf- lengthening exercises John gave me have made the world of difference to my knees - and that’s far more gratifying than any pedicure.

GBP 40 for 45 minutes. John Guthrie, Tonic Health, 41 Commercial Street, Leith, Edinburgh (0131 554 6161)

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Prairie du Sac A 60-year-old woman with sore knees might be wearing the same elastic brace as a Green Bay Packers player and not even know it. And that’s fine with the folks at Mueller Sports Medicine, as long as she keeps buying them.

The aging, aching baby boom generation represents a big marketing opportunity for Mueller, which has grown in the past five years to be a top provider in the United States of elastic wraps and joint braces.

“It’s phenomenal,” says founder Curt Mueller, a pharmacist who played basketball for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1950s. “Sometimes, when I look at this fabulous growth of Mueller, I say, When is it going to end?’ ”

At age 71, the company’s founder continues to live up to his reputation as an outgoing eccentric, sporting a gauzy white cotton jogging suit, gold chains and high-top athletic shoes in the office. His son Brett oversees day-to-day business as president of the company, but Mueller is there six days a week, opening the mail and offering ideas.

The business has weathered some tough times since 1961, when Mueller started mixing analgesics in the basement of his father’s drugstore and selling them from his car to school teams around the state.

The company, which has annual sales of $65 million, still sells a few lotions, powders and gels, but these days, the M Wrap in hot pink, an elastic wrap used by athletes, is a much bigger seller. Competition from giant companies such as Johnson & Johnson forced the company to branch into other products.

At a low point in the 1970s, Mueller was living in a trailer with his wife, three kids, a dog and a cat.

Now, on that same 85 acres, there’s a sprawling home, a guest house, private man-made lake, a horse stable and a driving range for employees on the campus, where the business operates from several buildings at the front of the property. Next door is the Sauk Prairie Airport, which serves private aircraft. Mueller recently bought the facility and is upgrading the airport with a new building and safety equipment.

He revived the business in the late 1970s with Quench Gum, a tart, thirst-quenching gum that is still used by athletes today. But an alliance in 1985 with an Ashland company that had patented support braces for elbows, knees, wrists and ankles is what set the stage for Mueller’s recent growth spurt.

Getting a leg up

Mueller began marketing the products to teams and sporting goods stores under the Mueller name, and soon after he targeted pharmacies as a way to expand sales. Small drugstores were receptive, but they bought small quantities. Big chain stores that could move thousands of units were a more difficult sell.

Herb Raschka, vice president of sales and marketing for the company, deserves much of the credit for breaking down the barriers at the chain stores, Mueller said.

“He’s taken us to another level,” Mueller said.

Raschka joined Mueller in 1997 from the Brady Co. in Milwaukee with the mission of getting more Mueller products into major retail chains. Since then, sales have tripled, he said.

“They were doing everything right, but they didn’t understand retail,” Raschka said.

Mueller had made good use of his athletic background and contacts to sell to teams and get endorsements from sports figures such as Wisconsin’s Alan “The Horse” Ameche and the Packers’ Fuzzy Thurston. But the company had only a few products in large retail stores.

Raschka, who had worked in national account sales for the Brady Co., realized that he needed to learn the ropes of retail quickly. The key to having a big presence in a large chain is to convince the retailer that you can manage the product presentation in the store and provide service, including the ability to forecast sales for the items in the store.

It took him a year to learn what needed to be done and assemble a team qualified to serve the retail giants. But now Mueller’s support products dominate the category in Wal-Mart, and Mueller has seven items in Walgreens. Mueller products also are sold in 21,000 small pharmacies and in sporting goods stores.

Ranks No. 3 in U.S.

Information Resources Inc., a Chicago data firm, ranks Mueller third in the U.S. in the muscle/body support device category, which had $266 million in sales in the 12 months that ended in March, excluding Wal-Mart.

In first and second place are the Ace and Futuro brands, with $62.8 million and $52.3 million in sales, respectively. Mueller’s sales in that category are $17.9 million. But Ace sales declined by 3% in that category, and Futuro’s went up by 2.7%, while Mueller’s rose by 118%.

If Wal-Mart sales were included, Mueller would rank higher, Raschka said. About 15% of Mueller’s sales are outside the U.S., in Asia, Europe and North, Central and South America.

Mueller’s goal is to increase sales to $150 million in the next five years, with emphasis on the international part of the business. The company hopes to increase sales internationally to up to half of its total revenues. Japan represents a large opportunity, with a big population of baby boomers, Raschka said.

Although the company develops some new products in-house, it is more interested in making licensing agreements with smaller companies that have a product that can be sold under the Mueller brand name, Raschka said.

The company’s growth so far has come without consumer advertising. With the Mueller name displayed prominently on products, the brand gets lots of exposure whenever an athlete using Mueller products is photographed.

Three years ago, Mueller introduced under-eye adhesive patches to replace the rub-on black sticky substance athletes use to reduce glare.

It was Curt Mueller’s idea to put his name on the patches, despite protests from staffers who said no one would ever want to run around with someone’s name on their face.

“He was right, we were wrong,” Raschka recalled.

Customers just want reliability

Now Mueller’s clipping service finds, on average, 500 images per week of athletes sporting the Mueller name on faces, arms and legs.

But those photos on the sports page probably won’t mean much to the average Wal-Mart and Walgreens customer for Mueller products, who is a woman between 35 and 70 years old, Raschka said.

For someone who’s in pain, the product needs to be on the shelf of the store where she shops, and it has to work.

And Mueller expects to be able to fill the bill on both those counts.

MUELLER WRAP-UP

– Business: Mueller Sports Medicine Inc., founded in 1961 in Prairie du Sac by Curt Mueller, owner.

– Products: Braces and supports, elastic wraps, Quench gum, cold packs, sports accessories, trainer kits, for a total of about 1,200 different products. About 35% are made in Prairie du Sac, where the company employs 140 people. Most items that require sewing, however, are outsourced.

– Family executives: Brett Mueller, president; Ginger Mueller- Mann, vice president, western region; Jeff Mueller, southwestern sales.

– Future: “We will remain family owned,” says Curt Mueller, who says he got 100 inquiries last year from prospective purchasers.

Copyright 2006, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

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