NPD Group, the international market research group, has found that shoes inspired by sports but designed for leisure wear are a growing category, more so than shoes designed to practice sports, in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Annual sales of these fashion athletic shoes grew by 2 percent, while sales of technical sports shoes went down by 2 percent. This echoes the trend in the USA, where sports-inspired footwear saw 12.4 percent growth in 2007.
The trend reached across all demographics. Women tended to wear their leisure shoes after work, whereas girls tended to wear them all day long. Males have the same tendencies, though they often opt for more traditional, even vintage, footwear. But Renaud Vaschalde, NPD’s Paris-based expert on the European sports market, noted that men will demand technical sports shoes for when they play a particular sport.
The five best-selling shoes in the countries studied in 2007 were Adidas’ Adi Racer, the ASICS Whizzer, Converse All Stars, the Nike Sprint Brother/Sister and the Nike Air Max series. All of these are either leisure or traditional shoes.
Vaschalde said the main reason for the growth in this segment is the increasing acceptance of sports-inspired shoes in the workplace, and thus in everyday life. While most of these shoes are worn by adolescents and people aged 18-34, the numbers are also increasing in the age group 35-44.
NPD also studied the venues where the shoes are purchased. Internet sales have continued growing over the last four years, making up 8 percent of sales in 2007 compared with just 2 percent in 2002. The U.K. had the biggest proportion of online sales, while Spain and Italy’s percentages were rather low. The biggest sales via the internet were of football shoes, which made up 10 percent of the total, with running accounting for 7 percent.
