on niche sneakers + moving product x staying weird

My feet in... rather generic Nikes.

I am not a sneaker head.

I did a comedy show on ABC TV last year, and one of the actors who made an appearance very definitely *is* a sneaker head. He apparently has a whole closet devoted to his obsession. He’s the guy who when he travels, makes well-researched sneaker shops his first destination when he hits the ground. I love it.

I am definitely not that guy.

Instead, I’m a bit like those annoying people with art - I know what I like. And mostly, I like things that both co-ordinate with my ensemble (or at least my fantasy ensemble), and that are kind of... obscure. That is not too ubiquitously branded. The opposite of a sneaker head, really. 

my Pinterest highlights - because we always have better taste than account balances, right? 

And, look - I found a pair in Paris earlier this year that I loved. They were by a small label called Arkk Copenhagen, at a really reasonable price point (hey, a girl’s got to drink wine). They were black and minimal and very lovely and…  not available in my size. 

I could have come home to Melbourne and ordered them online. I could have done that. But instead, for some reason (perhaps because I teeter precariously on the cusp of Generation X), I became hell-bent on finding them in a bricks-and-mortar store locally. 

A futile quest, I grant. I mean, utterly futile. They were in like three shops in Paris - why on earth did I think I’d find them - in all sizes and colour ways - here? Nope. Silly, silly. 

And yet, I’ve persisted. Even just this week, I tried to convince a store owner to import them himself.

Ugh. They're so good. and these aren't even the black ones. This image via here. 

“I can’t stock these,” he told me as we stood around his ridiculous-dollar-a-week commercially let, generically-hip, shopping centre-term tenuous, fit-out, “For starters they’re kind of similar in shape to the Y-3 Adidas Qasa” (ok). "And aside from that - everyone just wants Nike these days - or… you know. Actual Y-3s."

“But,” I argued, somewhat dejected again, “Don’t you think it’s so much nicer to wear smaller brands?"

“Oh, hell - absolutely!” the guy laughed. “But who’s going to buy them? You and two other people who follow you on Instagram? I’ve got to move product, mate."

Yeah. I know. I know. Oh, trust me, I know. 

When I ran my art and design store, Orlando and Ivy, I spent hours agonising over the product mix every week. There had to be some merchandise on my shelves that I knew would just fly out the door no matter the season. They were easy gift items; tasteful and well-designed enough that they had a clear place on the floor. 

But there were other items that I stocked… for me and two other people. Commercially un-viable art books, objects that dwelt on the precipice of beautiful and weird, and strange little tsotchkes that were utterly untested, but that every once in a while found very particular homes.

Me and my beloved retail space - right at the very beginning while I was still learning the ropes.

I remember a fellow design shop-owner once coming in to visit me, asking why on earth I stocked some of these items - in particular the more expensive ones. 

“Because I like them.” I replied.

To which he laughed incredulously and said, that the spend on each of those wholesale units was an awful lot to invest in something that the owner liked but the customer couldn’t identify with. And he was right. I closed Orlando and Ivy mid-2011, and I still have some of those items sitting in the back of my cupboard. 

But every time my eyes trail past them in their tissue paper and bubble-wrap, I’m reminded of how proud I was to have made those curatorial decisions. How in a way, their singular weirdness helped to define the project that I was undertaking with O&I. 

I have absolute respect for the dude who can’t afford to even venture the idea of stocking a tiny, obscure Danish sneaker brand. Shopping centre leases are a killer. I also know that this is a guy who owns another store that does take a few more risks in its merchandising - and that for many years has had an on-site gallery, for which he charges next to nothing - that, in a way, is his experimental practice - it’s a key risk that helps to support and define his work as a retailer who otherwise caters to the popular dollar.

It’s a fine balance. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And I reckon whether you’re in business or creative practice or a combination of both, to support your more obscure, more delicate, less audience-tested, experimental work, you’ve got to… well, maybe you’ve got to do whatever your version of stocking Nikes is.

But of course there's no one easy answer. Because maybe, maybe when you’ve had skin in the game for long enough, learned the ropes and developed your capital (and by capital I mean maybe cash but probably more importantly knowledge, experience, perspective and... courage) you might want to take the leap and start your very own Arkk Copenhagen. 

With the full knowledge of course that it almost certainly won’t be easy; that stockists will at first be hard to find; but that one, and then maybe two or three and then maybe three hundred people will eventually find you, fall in love with you, and seek you out wherever they live.