A Boomer Crosses his Path…
Over the past 2-3 years, I have tried to connect with as many of you in the shoe industry as possible. I did this because I knew that one day I would need to tell you about my big project.
I would like you to make shoes out of wool.
A material that not many of you know very well, and which most of you probably consider to be a material used for slippers. I am sure that you will change your mind, but that is not what I want to talk about at this time.
I am one of those old boomers who has been around so long that I can start to see repetitions. They say that history repeats itself, and I certainly see signs of a repetition of history that I myself experienced back in the 80s and 90s.
I started my apprenticeship as an advertising artist in 1985. A year after Apple launched its legendary Macintosh Classic. It wasn't until 1991 that I bought my own. Then I could set up text and images myself in Adobe's first versions of Illustrator and Pagemaker.
An otherwise long and laborious process that used to start with an art director, who made sketches and layouts, possibly together with a copywriter. Then the text was calculated and ordered from a typesetting agency, which delivered the text on white repro-ready paper. The draftsman (me) could then separate it and paste it onto a proof drawing. Black or red boxes were pasted where the images were supposed to be. When the proof drawing was flawless, you could rasterize the images and mount the whole thing together on a film, which you developed on the aforementioned proof camera. As a rule, we worked with one color: black. If it were in 4 colors, it immediately became more complicated and expensive.
On the Mac, I could now set up text and images in one workflow, and see it wysiwyg through the little peephole that the small 9” black and white screen represented. Super fast, super precise and super easy to edit.
A little later, larger color screens and scanners came along, so you could work in multiple colors in 1:1 size. I could now set up entire newspaper pages, make catalogs and brochures. Yes, I could even get entire brochures ready for printing in one workflow, if I had texts, prices and photos available.
Now things were going really fast, and I went from being a draftsman to being an Art Director, or rather DTP (Desk Top Publisher). Yes, it was a nice title, and I also got a nice salary. Because I was a sought-after employee who, in my mid-twenties, could pick and choose between lots of job offers.
The fact that I was also making many of my older colleagues unemployed worried me less. The old Art Directors, with their clever heads and beautiful lines, were far too snobbish to learn to use such a newfangled thing as a computer. That's how I experienced them, and in just five years, they were completely out of the game. There was simply no need for them anymore. You could look at a printout of what I was offering the customer. There was no need to sketch it out by hand first.
Do you see where I'm going?
WINTER IS COMING! - Now we have 3D software, and depending on where you are in the long chain of people who produce footwear, you can choose to take it as a threat or an opportunity.
Are you one of those old fine Art Directors who has no intention of learning the new tool, because it can't express the aesthetics and experience that you put into your sketches?
Or are you one of those who sees the opportunity to quickly realize your ideas and see them from all angles in 3D? Maybe even get your hands on them in the form of a preliminary 3D print?
Are you one of those who understands that you can now reduce the time from idea to finished product by hundreds of hours and dollars? Then you are probably one of those who uses the new technology and who wants to secure a place in the chain.
Do you also want to think about sustainable materials, and reduce both the development and production speed further, then you will also learn what felted wool shoes are. And so I ended up talking about wool shoes anyway.
Forgive me, and thank you for reading this far.
P.S. You can read more about wool shoes at dialogo.dk
Med venlig hilsen / Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Namaste
Thomas Glerup Kristensen
