More than 200,000 pairs of Kawasaki fashion shoes have been sold in Denmark this year, for the most part through 300-400 selected shoe shops and young fashion boutiques, probably making Kawasaki the second most popular Danish footwear brand after ECCO. The brand is well known now in some other Nordic European countries. It has virtually no presence yet anywhere else although a certain demand has emerged in the past year or so for this brand as an alternative to Converse from large potential markets such as the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Aceline, the Danish company that markets this special line of vulcanized footwear for badminton and casual wear since 2003, indicates that it is having a hard time responding to the demand from the Danish market alone, which exploded in the last couple of years, but it has geared up for a broader market launch in Continental Europe for the Spring/Summer 2008 season. Production capacities have been increased and Kawasaki fashion shoes will participate for the first time in the Bread & Butter show in Barcelona next July.

In the meantime the Danish company will make a little test in the trend-setting Italian market, banking on the international popularity of the retro/vintage trend that has made the success of Converse, Lacoste and similar brands over the past few years. Similar initiatives have been taken in Spain and Greece for the Spring/Summer 2007 season.

Retailing on average for the equivalent of about €65 a pair for the standard model in cotton and rubber with a suede tip, well below the price of comparable Converse styles, Kawasaki shoes come in many colors that tend to change every month to supply the retailers constantly with fresh new products, although they all come out of the same mould.

The line has been particularly popular this past summer among high school girls between the ages of 16 and 20. In many cases the actual customers have been the girls’ mothers, who used to buy similar Kawasaki shoes to wear in the discos during the 1980s, leading the brand to reach a peak a generation ago, in 1985, with sales of 250,000 pairs. Some of these mothers are buying some fancy new models of Kawasaki shoes in leather and other special materials that are being offered in certain Danish stores. Children’s shoes are also a recent addition to the line.

Kawasaki shoes have an interesting history that is worth mentioning. Like Converse, which made its mark originally with basketball, or Lacoste, another very popular footwear brand right now that started off in tennis, the Kawasaki brand started out with badminton, which is one of the most popular national sports in Denmark. The Italian owner of the Kappa brand, BasicNet, is trying to revive Superga, a tennis shoe brand that had a similar history in Italy.

The Kawasaki footwear line was first launched in 1973 by a former Danish company, Hammergaard Hansen Sport, that was importing exclusive Kawasaki badminton racquets along with tennis racquets by Snauwaert and other products including Romika shoes and Quick football boots. The Japanese company that was making Kawasaki branded racquets goes back to 1912 and has nothing to do with the brand of motorcycles by the same name.

ASICS was at the time the main supplier of footwear for badminton players, along with a variety of Hong Kong manufacturers of dubious quality. However these shoes, where the upper and the sole were glued together after the vulcanizing process, were generally too small for Danish feet and made it difficult for the shoes to resist the players’ frequent and violent staccato movements on hard surfaces.

The breakthrough happened when the company’s owner, Jørgen Hammergaard, and one of his salesmen, Preben Boas, found a Czech company at the ISPO show in Munich, Exico, that was offering an interesting shoe model that could be adopted for badminton. Its sole and edge reinforcements were built in such a way that they prevented skidding on the floor without sticking to the pavement, and on top of that the shoe felt comfortable to wear. The shoe came from one of Bata’s old Czech factories in Gotwalddorf, which was producing up to 120 million pairs annually based on an exclusive hot vulcanization method, more ancient and more effective than the process used in Asia, where the heat blended all the components more solidly together.

Boas, who now runs the Danish sporting goods< industry association, got Bata’ former Czech vulcanizing factory, Svet, to use the same mould to produce a line of badminton shoes for Hammergaard that bore the Kawasaki brand name, in agreement with the Japanese firm. The line was a success, with some 50,000 pairs sold annually in the late ‘seventies. Kawasaki rubber shoes were even used for performance sports by a Danish handball champion, Jørgen Petersen, and by the Lanudrups family for indoor football.

The peak was reached in the ‘eighties when Kawasaki became a fashion product, but things changed for Hammergaard in the ‘nineties when the disco fashion trend subsided and when the state-owned Czech factory that was producing the shoes was privatized, changing its name to Nordvesta, and then closed down.

Hammergaard eventually retired and closed his company, but then one of his employees, Bo Stanley, decided to revive the Kawasaki footwear line three years ago. He did that in combination with Tom Christensen, who still distributes Hi-Tec Sports footwear and Pro Kennex racquets for tennis, squash and badminton in Denmark through a company called Aceline. They secured Hammergaard’s footwear rights to the Kawasaki brand and salvaged the lasts of the shoes. They went down to the Czech Republic and found the old hot vulcanizing machinery that was sitting idly and a group of five former technicians who agreed to start the production again with their financial support. The workers set up a small workshop in Gottwalddorf, which has changed its name to Zlin, and the operation was been turned into a regular factory that makes also other styles for the Czech market (more in Shoe Intelligence).