Some Camper shoes look like they were stolen from a bowling alley. Others have messages inscribed on their soles. With certain styles, the right and left shoes don't match. On purpose.
Yet for more than a decade, this quirky footwear company has racked up more sales in its native Spain than any other casual-shoe brand. Now the company is going global, with stores in London, Milan, New York, Paris, and Taiwan. Last year, sales topped $120 million -- more than 3 million pairs of shoes sold. The industry's leading trade publication, Footwear News, named Camper "fashion brand of the year," and all kinds of celebrities -- from Woody Allen to Rosie O'Donnell to Robert Redford to Bruce Willis -- kick around in the unique shoes. It's not the largest shoe company in the world nor the most visible. But it is arguably the most unusual and, for the moment at least, the hottest shoe company on Earth.
It all starts with Camper's sense of place -- geography, culture, and history. In an economy dominated by design, and in an industry propelled by design hype, Camper's geocentric approach offers both an important antidote to and an interesting lesson in authentic design and counterintuitive marketing.
Camper Pedagogy
You start to learn the Camper story from a travelogue that comes with every pair of shoes. It's usually printed on an attached tag or in an accompanying brochure. The words or pictures may vary, but the message is clear: These shoes come from Majorca (Mallorca, to Spaniards),
http://bjhe.com.cn/bbs/forum.php?mod...=252903&extra=, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean. "Camper" means "peasant" in Catalan,
http://www.gridpolitics.com/pg/blog/...o-not-know-why, and the shoes are inspired by farmer footwear and steeped in island tradition.
The tale is effective as a source code for the product and as a marketing tool to the world. Lorenzo Fluxá, who started Camper in 1975, has always said that it's better to build a brand around old-fashioned ideas than to try to be fashion-forward. "When people call us a 'fashion brand,' it offends me," says Fluxá, 54. "We don't like the fashion world at all. We're trying not to take ourselves too seriously."
Plenty of fashion designers insist that their clothes are timeless, but few actually craft their product from the attributes that exist entirely within their own time zone -- without regard to outside taste or opinion. "Some people try to tell us what kind of product to make," says Guillermo Ferrer, 45, Camper's design director and all-purpose muse. "We appreciate their opinions, but we usually say, 'No thank you.' We make Majorcan shoes. If they don't want our product,
http://www.cilginmt2.com/forum/index...5124#msg165124, we accept their decision, close the factory, and go home."
And yet these shoes, which are created out of the company's strong sense of itself and are rich in local character, have become globally chic. In a marketing flip worthy of the new economy, Camper's old-economy unwillingness to compromise has made it hot. Camper is design with a comfortable twist and a wink. And every day, more and more urban dwellers are slipping on their Campers and winking right back.
Uni###### or Casual ######?
Fluxá has always understood the role that history and geography can play in selling shoes. Majorca sits about 150 miles off the coast of Barcelona, and until airplanes started unloading tourists there, farmers and craftsmen drove the economy. By the time Fluxá was a young man, however, tourists had discovered the island. He made friends with some of the European vacationers -- and faced his father's disapproval. "The way he transmitted his values to me was very clever," Fluxá recalls. "He would make jokes about my long hair, about my friends,
Christian Louboutin 1:1 Grade Leopard Veins Suede High-heel, and about my shoes."
A fourth-generation shoemaker, Fluxá comes from a long line of shoe innovators. His grandfather is renowned for having sailed to England to haul the first pieces of modern shoe-making machinery back to Majorca. Fluxá's father was actually born in the family shoe factory; ultimately, he took over the family business, Lottusse, which specialized in dress shoes. When it was his turn, Fluxá found that he liked the shoe business -- but was bored stiff by the company's product line. Meanwhile, his urbane friends from mainland Spain kept asking him where he bought his slip-ons -- espadrille-style footwear fashioned after old peasant shoes that islanders would cobble together from cast-off canvas and recycled rubber. Sensing an opportunity, he asked his father to help him launch his own line of casual shoes.
To Fluxá senior,
Christian Louboutin 1:1 Grade Leopard Veins Suede High-heel, the idea verged on sacrilege. (He called it a "prostitution of the family business.") Retailers who had been loyal to the family for decades were puzzled by the new concept. "I told them of my plan to make casual uni###### shoes, and I got two letters back from people who said that they would never sell these 'dirty shoes,' " says the younger Fluxá. "They had never even heard the word 'uni######'! They confused it with 'casual ######.' "
Eventually, Fluxá's father agreed to let him try a low-cost experiment with his espadrilles. The old-line retailers never quite figured out how to sell the shoes. But once the dictatorship lost power in Spain, and stores began to sell blue jeans and other casual clothes, Fluxá convinced those outlets to carry Campers. Sales took off.
Christian Louboutin 1:1 Grade Leopard Veins Suede
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