Share the STIK love!, by Deleted on Jun 14, 2016 21:32:53 GMT 1,

Jun 14, 2016 0:15:42 GMT 1 met said:

Jun 12, 2016 14:24:09 GMT 1 @bren said:

Always brings me back to this i read a good few years back, books called the tipping point,  (lots of words, sorry)


© Malcolm Gladwell, 2000

For Hush Puppies, the Tipping Point - that one dramatic moment in an epidemic, when everything can change all at once - came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995.

The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales of the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight cr*pe sole were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives - Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis - ran into a stylist from New York, who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan.


"We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were re-sale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were going to the little stores that still carried them." Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback.

By the autumn of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. First, the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Manhattan designer, Anna Sui, called, wanting shoes for her show. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a 25ft inflatable basset hound - the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand - on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique.

In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner, and the president of the firm stood up on the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that - as he would be the first to admit - his company had almost nothing to do with.

How did that happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren't deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then the fad spread to two designers, who used the shoes to peddle something else - high fashion. The shoes were an incidental touch. No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Yet, somehow, that's exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. How does a $30 pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters and designers to every mall in America in the space of two years?

The best way to understand the Hush Puppy boom, or the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life, is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas, products, messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do. Their chief characteristics - one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment - are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a school or flu attacks every winter.

I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.

Regrettably, the integrity of the post is compromised by your inclusion of a dozen separate advertisements for eBáy.

Now, why would you undermine an interesting post — and, by extension, your own reputation — in such a manner?

Is this a sly attempt to bypass the forum ban on links to eBáy auctions? Are you an eBáy stooge? Are you on the take? How much are the bastards paying you?

I get a kick back from every sale made on the internet, its only a small percentage, but it keeps the kids in shoes

i don't know Met if you were referring to my post?  If you were, i have not got a clue what you mean by links to ebay on my post?  I simply copied the bit of the book having searched the tipping point from google

If you were not referring to my post, then i feel rather forlorn, 

Jun 14, 2016 0:15:42 GMT 1 met said:

Jun 12, 2016 14:24:09 GMT 1 @bren said:

Always brings me back to this i read a good few years back, books called the tipping point,  (lots of words, sorry)


© Malcolm Gladwell, 2000

For Hush Puppies, the Tipping Point - that one dramatic moment in an epidemic, when everything can change all at once - came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995.

The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales of the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight cr*pe sole were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives - Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis - ran into a stylist from New York, who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan.


"We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were re-sale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were going to the little stores that still carried them." Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback.

By the autumn of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. First, the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Manhattan designer, Anna Sui, called, wanting shoes for her show. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a 25ft inflatable basset hound - the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand - on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique.

In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner, and the president of the firm stood up on the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that - as he would be the first to admit - his company had almost nothing to do with.

How did that happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren't deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then the fad spread to two designers, who used the shoes to peddle something else - high fashion. The shoes were an incidental touch. No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Yet, somehow, that's exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. How does a $30 pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters and designers to every mall in America in the space of two years?

The best way to understand the Hush Puppy boom, or the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life, is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas, products, messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do. Their chief characteristics - one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment - are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a school or flu attacks every winter.

I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.

Regrettably, the integrity of the post is compromised by your inclusion of a dozen separate advertisements for eBáy.

Now, why would you undermine an interesting post — and, by extension, your own reputation — in such a manner?

Is this a sly attempt to bypass the forum ban on links to eBáy auctions? Are you an eBáy stooge? Are you on the take? How much are the bastards paying you?

I get a kick back from every sale made on the internet, its only a small percentage, but it keeps the kids in shoes

i don't know Met if you were referring to my post?  If you were, i have not got a clue what you mean by links to ebay on my post?  I simply copied the bit of the book having searched the tipping point from google

If you were not referring to my post, then i feel rather forlorn,