Back when I was in middle and early high school, I loved adidas. I played soccer and ran quite a bit, so their products dominated the market at that time. adidas controled market share in soccer/futbol so they were easy to find and offered a varitey of styles and price points.
It was my junior year of high school, that I drew the line in the sand. I went through 3 pair of adidas running shoes within a 3-4 month window. No it was not beause I would putting that many miles on the shoes and needed to go through that many, it was because their QA was failing and the same model shoe was defective. So after they replaced my shoe the 3rd time and it failed again, I switched. I went with Nike and Asics. When I got to college my freshman year, we were offered to wear either Nike (which was preferred) or Asics. At that point forward I wore Nike.
When I graduated college, I took a marketing/sales position with Nike, so for the next 4.5 years if Nike didn’t make it, I almost didn’t wear it. They made jeans, but I didn’t wear their jeans! I am also the sample size (9US) so any of the promotions we were launching for footwear, after the launch, instead of that sample going into a warehouse somewhere to die, they let me keep them. I had between 75-90 pairs of Nikes by the time I stopped working there and right when I got married. My wife said this marriage won’t work with you hafving more shoes than me, I knew not working for Nike at this point I couldn’t buy enough shoes at retail prices for her to catch up to me, so I donated a bunch of these shoes.
Many years later, my company that I’m working with now, gave my team of employees a promotional gift for $160 at adidas customize shoes. So I thought what the heck, it’s free and I was needing a new pair of kicks, so why not try them out again.
I went onto their Mi adidas site for customization to pick out a shoe and design the colors that I wanted. Nike started this mainstream through their NikeID (which I had/have a few).
Below is the finished product of what I designed. These came from Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam from their factory there according to the shipping tracking.
Other than the color selection the only real personalization was the insert with BINMAN.
I’ve only slipped them on to see if the generally fit and they did so that’s good. I just got cleared by the doctor to run again so I’ll be giving these a try this weekend.
Brian K Inman 