A Boot For a Broken Foot

In 1945 a German army doctor called Klaus Märtens hurt his ankle skiing in the Bavarian Alps. His standard-issue boots were agony on the injured foot.

While he was recovering he made a sole. Air-cushioned, built from salvaged material, designed to solve one specific problem belonging to one specific person: his own foot hurt and the available footwear made it worse.

He showed it to an engineer friend, Herbert Funck, and they began producing shoes. For the first decade the customers were mostly older women who wanted something comfortable to walk in.

Hold that sentence next to everything that came afterwards, because the gap between them is the entire lesson of this chapter.

In 1959 they advertised abroad. A British maker, Griggs, bought the patent, and on the first of April 1960 the 1460 came off the line in Northamptonshire. The name is the date. It is a small thing and a good one: a name that simply records a fact never needs defending and costs nothing to keep true.

Then it went where nobody sent it.

Postmen and factory workers first, because it was cheap and hard to destroy. Then skinheads. Then punks. Then goths, then grunge bands, then a long list of groups who had nothing in common with each other and often actively disliked each other, all reaching for the same boot.

Why that boot?

Because it carried no argument of its own. It was cheap, indestructible and worn by working men, which meant it read as authenticity rather than as fashion. An object that already means something specific can only be worn by people who agree with it. An object that means work and durability and nothing else is a blank surface, and each group could pour a different meaning in without contradicting the last one.

That is the property, and it is not something a brand can manufacture. You cannot design a garment to be adopted. The moment you try, you have added an argument, and the argument is what stops it being adoptable.

Now the part that is genuinely difficult, and it should be said plainly rather than tidied away.

Some of the groups who took this boot were ones no company would choose. A brand that becomes a uniform does not get to approve the list, and it does not get consulted. Meaning is granted by wearers rather than issued by owners, and there is no mechanism by which a company retrieves it.

So what is actually left to decide?

Only the response. Keep making the thing well. Keep the price roughly where it was, so the people who made it mean something can still buy it. Do not stage the panicked repositioning where a brand distances itself from its own customers, because that is heard exactly as it is meant, and the people who leave are the ones who gave you the thing you were embarrassed about.

The founding fact is still the best part of the story. The most politically loaded boot of the twentieth century exists because one man's foot hurt and he thought he could do better than what he had been issued.

Nobody in that room was thinking about youth culture. They were thinking about an ankle.