A question about shoe sales

I was reading Malakye’s message boards when I stumbled across a discussion on the state of our shoe market. It started with PacSun stating that they weren’t going to be selling closed-toe shoes anymore, and the discussion was on how this affected the Industry’s shoe companies. Is PacSun a big chunk of their market, or will they be doing just fine selling to the smaller, core retail shops? Alongside this question was that of why aren’t the shoes selling in the first place? To go with this, someone had posted a comment that in TW Business, the CEO of Zumiez states "We hit a wall in DEC w/ the footwear business. We're still assessing what's going on." With this statement, it seems that neither PacSun nor Zumiez are doing well in the shoe category. So, what I’m wondering after all of this is why aren’t the mall shoppers buying our shoes? I think that’s more of a factor than PacSun not wanting to sell them—the shoe companies will be fine in the long run without being in PacSun, but what does this say about the aesthetics of the shoes? PacSun stopped selling them because no one was buying—so that’s the point to be concerned about.

Shop-Eat-Surf recently did an interesting article on this same topic. To sum it up, Osiris found themselves with a smaller client base when skinny jeans came into style—skate shoes with big tongues don’t look too hot with skinny jeans. They were losing business because people where buying a scaled down shoe. Is this what’s going on, not only with Osiris, but across the board? It would make sense—the mall shopper wears the jeans, then buys something like a Puma or Adidas (which may not be necessarily in PacSun or Zumiez) to go with it. What do you think?

Comments

[j]

I'm not sue how much skaters wearing their mothers pants really had to do with the downfall of Osiris. An additional portion can be pointed to having all their styles pinned to one manufacturing type.

Both Osiris and Circa were selling tech skate shoes in the $85 - $100 price range. With the introduction of the Geoff Rowley pro model and the gradual shift to vulcanized shoes neither of those companies along with others including: Aido, DC. etc were prepared to shift their manufacturing from cup sole to Vulcanized. Essentially they weren't diversified and followed a market trend. While they may have been good shoes the inability to make the jump in manufacturing really killed them.

Pac Sun and Zumiez have openly admitted they are getting hurt by internet sales. Closeouts & clearance online from CCS, the backcountry.com family and Zappos is eating away at their customer base. Additionally the generation of consumers who were enchanted with action sports and lifestyle thanks to tony hawk pro skater and Tony's 900 are simply doing one of two things:

1. Abandoning the space ie. growing up and out of it. Moving on and maturing in to other pursuits
or
2. Growing with it and continuing down the lifestyle path. With that means abandoning the mall shops and going to core shops.

If shoe companies see these stores cutting orders as the fourth horseman of the apocalypse it's time to innovate or die. Disruptive change tends to be what breaks a tough business cycle. One thought is opening up new avenues of sale: online, retail in places not expected to reach a new client base. That's tough from the marketing and branding perspective but it is possible.

Another option is to revisit the product and attempt to generate new products that fall outside what all other skate shoes are doing. Again, tough but possible.