sutori

Stories and shades of grey

July 14th, 2006

Things have been a wee bit quiet on the Sutori blog lately as we’ve all been heads down trying to build or little labor of love.

I thought I would break the silence today by posting a sample story based on a personal experience. On a scale of 1-10, this one would have a goodwill rating of about 7, because even though I’m griping a bit, I still loves me some Adidas.

To me, this apparent contradiction illustrates something important about what we’re trying to do with Sutori. Like most relationships, the one between customers and businesses is not as simple as simple as love or hate, black or white. It’s more complicated than that. There are always shades of grey. There’s always context. There’s always a story.

So here’s one of mine:

I love Adidas . . . but this is not a love story.

Ever since I was a kid, the three stripes have made me happy. They have a certain iconic appeal that is seared into my consciousness. A sort of timeless beauty.

Because I fell under the Adidas spell as a kid in the seventies and eighties, I especially love retro-style Adidas. These days I think they call them “Adidas originals”.

So you can imagine how pleased I was when they opened a store in Vancouver (where I live) dedicated entirely to Adidas Originals. I discovered the store while walking past one day and a half hour later I walked out with a pair of shoes. A beautifully ugly pair of tennis shoes call Forest Hills.

I was a happy man.

But a few weeks later, I was less happy. The first problem was the holes. Turns out that when they were released in the early eighties Forest Hills were considered very innovative. First, they are extremely light. Sounds great so far. But they were also designed so that the feet of the tennis player wearing them woudl be cool and ventilated. To accomplish this, they basically put holes in the bottom of the shoes.

This makes perfect sense if you are playing tennis on a hot day. But a little less sense if you are walking around very rainy city like Vancouver. No one at the store told me about these holes when I bought the shoes.

Not a great start.,

But I was still happy. A little duct tape inside the toes and voila! No more soggy socks.

But then came the matter of the glue. There is a strip of suede across each toe of the shoe. And within 2 weeks of my purchase these strips started to come loose as the apparently cheap glue holding them on lost its stickiness.

That’s when my adventures in shoe repair began. A few months, a few experiments and a new glue collection later, I’ve finally arrived at a workable method to patch them up when the glue starts to give out. It involves a tube of crazy glue, a roll of packing tape and, most importantly, a whole lot of forgiveness for the “mark of the three stripes”.

So why should Adidas care?

After decades of loyalty, I tried on a pair of Pumas just last week.

Entry Filed under: stories