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Love at First Step

The summer I was 12, my mom bought me my first pair of name brand shoes. They were black Reeboks with white detail and they were absolutely hideous. It didn’t help that my height hadn’t caught up with my size 9 feet yet or that my mother insisted on buying shoes a size too big “to grow into.” I’ve always wondered if this had not been her mantra, would my feet would have gotten that big in the first place? Despite the fact that it looked like I was wearing snow shoes…in Florida…in July, I was thrilled with the purchase.

I had never been the kind of girl to care about tags and titles, especially not shoes, but that previous school year, I’d experienced the shame of wearing no names. They fit me and they were cute, which was more than I could say for the cheapest pair of name brand shoes my mother could find to appease me, but they weren’t enough. I’d worked hard to fulfill my side of the bargain of straight A’s to get me to the promised land of labels, but my reward was less like milk and honey and more like cheap and ugly. Next time I needed new shoes, I got Pumas and then Adidas, leaping from brand to brand with no commitment to anything but the little red sign that said “Sale.”

A few years later, I got into running. I ran when I was happy. I ran when I was sad. I ran when I was angry and that was often considering the teenage angst my hormone-riddled self inflicted upon me. It was on the pavements of my hometown of DeLand that I discovered true brand evangelism—Nike is my homeboy. Whether the shoes actually fit better, wick away sweat differently, or more effectively absorb the shock of 5’8” girl slamming into the ground for three miles than comparable brands, I do not know. What I do know, is I feel like they do. This feeling was brought about not by careful study and research, nor by that catchy slogan, “Just do it,” but by my cousin who loved his Nike’s too. Three years older and so much wiser at his 17 years, Ben was a star track athlete at his high school. He lived in another state and I only got to see him once a year, but I adored him. He told me if I was going to be a real runner, I better get some Nike’s--they were the best. Two months of babysitting later, I was lacing up my first pair of Nike’s, but had been a certifiable convert long before I ever test-ran the product thanks to my cousin’s fervor.

When the sneaker meets the pavement, it isn’t the color, the price, or even necessarily the brand that is initially responsible for true brand commitment—it’s the relationship. My Nike’s aren’t just shoes to me; they’re memories of my cousin. It’s just like how Tide isn’t just detergent, but the smell of my childhood. Every brand I care about comes not from how fabulous it is in and of itself, but the associations that give it context in my life. In this crazy world of fad and fashion, being committed to anything is a rarity. A brand that finds its audience through its relationship to them is the brand that makes it through the chaos of change.