Reebok
In the 1980s, Reebok was bigger than Nike.
You’re more likely to find a pair of Reebok shoes on someone’s feet than on a shelf. But that dynamic completely reversed in the 90s (see: Michael Jordan and the meteoric rise of the Swoosh) with the emergence of Nike all signs pointing to Reebok’s premature demise. It’s just that the company didn’t get a little help from a popular but unlikely source: hip-hop.
“Hip-hop culture and Reebok are kind of synonymous,” Reebok Classics head Todd Krinsky told Digital Trends. And he is right; rappers consistently wear Reeboks on the soles of their feet while singing rhymes about them on the tips of their tongues for decades. Legendary rapper Redman proudly declared that he “don’t have a car, but he owns a pair of Reeboks” on his 1992 song. Watch Yo Nuggets. Southern rap pioneer Juvenile noted that people were “wearing Reeboks instead of Nikes” on his 1998 track. Children of the ghetto.
Reebok Presents ‘3:AM’ NYC – Full Length
But even with its popularity in hip-hop, Reebok didn’t make hip-hop an integral part of the company’s success until the early 2000s when it began signing top talent in the industry such as 50 Cent, Jay-Z and Pharrell. , instead of with athletes. Krinsky likes to call those years Reebok’s “glory days.”
Now hip-hop is the most popular music genre in the world, while Reebok is in a relaunch phase. At the recent presentation of Reebok 3 in the morning shoe collaboration with graffiti artist Trevor “Trouble” Andrew, Krinsky — who has been with Reebok for more than two decades — gave Digital Trends insight into how important hip-hop is to the Reebok brand and how one NBA player was the catalyst for the entire hip-hop brand -hop movement.
Answer
At the turn of the century, Reebok was in trouble. Sales fell 20 percent between ’97 and and ’99, while Nike nearly tripled as its share of the sportswear market reached a whopping 39 percent compared to Reebok’s 14 percent. Then one of Reebok’s most successful patrons went through a kind of metamorphosis that brought the then 41-year-old company into unknown territory.
“I think, actually, to begin with, we’ve definitely been in the music business for a very long time, but it was actually Allen Iverson who started it. We signed Allen as a basketball player, but he was kind of a rapper in a basketball player’s body,” Krinsky said. “He opened our way into hip-hop culture.”
Iverson has been an integral part of Reebok since signing in 1996, but transformed into the company’s savior after releasing his first rap song, 40 Barz, under the rap moniker Jewelz. Even with a song that drew flak for its homophobic and misogynistic lyrics, Reebok put big marketing money behind Iverson’s hip-hop aesthetic in the iconic 2001 ad for Iverson’s Answer 5 shoe. The video featured fellow hip-hop artist Jadakiss rapping to the sounds of bouncing basketballs and swinging nets.
By the end of 2001, Iverson’s A5 shoes were so successful that Reebok signed Iverson to his first and only lifetime contract. During an NBA broadcast in late November 2001, TNT NBA analyst Hubie Brown even mentioned that Iverson’s shoe “was the best-selling sneaker in the business.” From then on, hip-hop remained an important part of Reebok’s secret sauce for relevance.
Jay-Z and beyond
Around the time of Iverson’s hip-hop transformation, Krinsky said Reebok felt that “kids don’t care that much about basketball players; they look for their influence in music.” Imagine Reebok coming to the conclusion that athletes wearing their shoes aren’t cool anymore — that’s a true existential crisis for the athletic footwear and apparel company. As well as being irrelevant.
“Hip hop culture and Reebok are synonymous.”
“We had that infamous boardroom meeting where the brand president said, ‘We need to become more relevant. If it’s not basketball, but music, tell me who,’ Krinsky added. “I told him, ‘There’s definitely a guy, but he’s going to be hard to get.’ He wondered, ‘Who?’ Then I said, ‘Jay-Z.'”
Shortly thereafter, in 2002, Reebok signed Jay-Z. Until the end S. Carter Collections in its first year of sales, Reebok shipped an incredible 500,000 pairs of shoes from a guy who had never sold a single sneaker in his life. After experiencing this success, Reebok moved into hip-hop signing, landing lucrative shoe deals with hip-hop producers Pharrell and 50 Cent. In ’04. In 2011 – a year after the deal was signed – sales of Reebok’s footwear in the US increased by 17 percent, in large part due to continued investment in hip-hop.
This new venture for the brand proved fruitful, but it wasn’t enough to help Reebok dethrone Nike and it was eventually bought by Adidas in 2005 — but it took hip hop with it.
Rapper turned designer
Today, hip-hop is still vitally important to the Reebok brand. The company recently enlisted fashion rapper Cam’ron to help release the 20th anniversary of its classic running shoe, the DMX Run 10. This is the same Cam’ron who started wearing all-pink in the early 2000s because (according to a 2004 interview) he did not want to “be dressed like everyone else”. A unique union, no doubt, but it wasn’t just for show — Cam’ron had a lot of input into the shoe’s design and worked directly with Reebok.
“Reebok sends me a bunch of crap for me, and I tell them, ‘No, I’m definitely not going to do this. Hell no.’ We could do it if we adapted this, this, and this,” Cam’ron told Digital Trends 3 in the morning an event. “We’ll go through that process and narrow it down to what I like and that’s how we get to the final sneaker.”
For his own spin on the DMX Run 10, Krinksy says Cam went through Reebok’s archives and chose a specific silhouette, style and technology to work with while adding “a lot of his influence in the shoe.” The DMX Run 10 was Cam’s third collaboration with Reebok and, much like the previous two, had a limited run aimed at only the most die-hard Cam’ron (and Reebok) fans.
“It was never meant to be such a big deal for everyone. It’s really for people who mess with Cam, who he is, and follow him,” Krinsky said. Reebok only released 500 pairs of Cam’ron’s Reebok Ventilator Supreme inspired Purple haze sneakers in April 2016, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of Jay-Z’s S. Carter Collection shoes shipped during his hip-hop heyday.
What’s next?
While the reduced release with Cam’ron may indicate that the brand is losing interest in hip-hop, it’s actually the opposite. From the outside, it looks like 2018 could be shaping up to be Reebok’s most prolific year since its glory days with Jay-Z.
Take, for example, in 2017, Reebok either signed endorsement deals or released collaborations with hip-hop hitmakers Gucci Mane, Rae Sremmurd, and Future. When releasing Future’s signature shoe called the Reebok Furykaze, Reebok decided against a limited run, ordering much larger distribution. Much like it did in the early 2000s, Reebok is hoping hip-hop will breathe new life into one of the company’s most iconic brands.
“I think we kind of restarted [Reebok] There are few classics in the US,” Krinsky told us. “We wanted to do it through music, because it is our heritage; it is our history.”
Besides discovering Andrew’s 3 in the morning sneakers, Reebok also presented the first part of its 3 in the morning a video series focused on artists showing off their creativity before most people get out of bed — hence the name 3:AM. The series is one of the company’s first forays into visual storytelling centered around its shoe collaborators and could lead to Reebok acting as a record label, with Krinsky adding, “We’re trying to do original content, which could also come with original music.”
Cam told us he plans to release his next collaboration with Reebok — the Fleekbok 4’s — in June 2018, but he stopped short before telling us the Reebok silhouette he used.
“I can’t tell you, because [Reebok] get angry. They get really angry.”
The sneaker game is like the rap game and Reebok is ready to enter 2018 with a firm understanding of both.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn