Your official title at PF Flyers is “Brand Ambassador”—what does that involve?
I’m their glorified poster child, more or less. This involves a lot of brand research, archival collecting, and organizing existing materials; from there I try to reference potentially lucrative points in that archive. I also try to get shoes to people--vintage dealers, collectors, designers, musicians, etc.--that already dig the brand. I’ve done a little bit of design, too: 3 uppers and several t-shirts.
Is this a position you sought out, or did it find you?
I met the PF guys through Frank the Butcher. He asked me if I was still collecting sneakers, which I did a lot of back in the day, but at that point I had sold almost everything but my PF Flyers. I was really fascinated by the brand’s history, even doing some research on my own time--collecting old point of sale cards and kids shoebox prizes, for instance. So Frank asked why I wasn’t doing anything for PF, and it was mostly because I didn’t know anyone there. So he plugged me into Vic Avela, their GM, and Ouigi Theodore, another Brand Ambassador (and founder of Brooklyn Circus), and that was it.
PF has been dormant for years. Why do you think it’s coming back now? Why does it matter, and why should people care?
Read any new company’s mission statement, and it’s all the same key words rearranged: “we appreciate heritage, craftsmanship, America, blah, blah.” It’s all the same fucking words laid out like refrigerator magnets. But PF Flyers actually has American social and pop cultural relevance. There are ads with Mickey Mouse wearing PF--they sponsored the Mickey Mouse Club for like 10 years--and they sponsored American Bandstand. If you want to get into “Americana” “heritage” brand shit, it doesn’t get more American than Mickey Mouse and Dick Clark. But even if PF’s history is a big fuck-off to everyone else, they’re still mostly undiscovered as a heritage brand. So my stance is that, instead of chasing the market, just tell people what you did.
PF was also first to build a brand around an athlete. Jack Purcell was a very well-dressed and internationally known badminton player, so PF endorsed him from 1935 to his retirement in 1955. They built a brand around him: golf shoes, basketball shoes, ladies shoes, and an entire catalogue different products. It was a franchise that ran from 35 to 74, the year Converse bought PF. Even though the government filed an antitrust suit and made them sell PF shortly after, they were allowed to keep the Jack Purcell brand. He never actually had a relationship with Converse.
Jack Purcell was the first Jordan brand in American history. People argue that Chuck Taylor was a brand, but it was never really was, it was just the shoe.
You’ve done your share of sneaker research before and after starting at PF--what have you learned along the way? What can you share with us?
At the turn of the century you have schools paying more attention to athleticism, but kids mostly wore shoes that were glued or stamped onto a leather sole. I’m not exactly sure who first applied the process of vulcanization to an athletic shoe, but from all the research that I’ve done—and I’m by no means an authority—Colchester were the first people to do it. If you Google “Colchester shoes,” you’ll see all of the classic sneaker DNA: patch on the ankle, vulcanized wrap, and canvas on the upper. Colchester were the first cats to do this kind of athletic shoe.
Shortly thereafter, or at around the same time, several rubber and canvas companies entered the athletic shoe market. Most people don’t know this, but Converse and BF Goodrich (PF) made rubber way before they made shoes. So from the 1930s from the 1960s, you have the big 3 running parallel with the same formula.
One interesting thing about PF is that they went really went big into rubberized shoes and work boots. The thing with adults at the time was that they didn’t wear sneakers--ever. If you were an adult mowing the lawn, you’d be wearing a captoe shoe, or something like that. So what PF did, which is kind of the beginning of the dressed down Friday thing, was that they made casual mens uppers on a rubberized sole. They weren’t the only people to do it, but they made bigger inroads than most into casual and semi-formal mens footwear. They made it so you could essentially wear sneakers with slacks without looking like you were wearing sneakers with slacks.
And the name, “PF Flyers?” Where did that come from?
Parents liked rubberized shoes because they were cheap, but kids were getting flat feet due to the lack of support. So BF Goodrich goes to orthopedists and asks: “how do we make this a better product?” From here you get the BF Goodrich “Posture Foundation,” which added a ridged wedge heel counter and built-in arch support. Mom and Dad loved it, but how do you make this sound cool to kids? Trim “Posture Foundation” down to “PF” (because it otherwise sounds like castor oil), and add “Flyers.”
