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<< Back to Bata's fairtrade
high-top versions with organic hemp canvas uppers, made in a
democratic country
<< Back to plimsolls page
& european-made canvas shoes
Dunlop Green Flash trainers still sold with green laces
as well as the normal white.
A Vietnamese trainer with an unusual style & brand history,
the Green Flash Trainer used to be the universal choice
of middle class families who called it a "tennis shoe"
and mums who bought it at Woolworth's before sending their children
to school. Its roots go back to the mid nineteenth century, when
John
Boyd Dunlop's Liverpool Rubber Company patented a way of
sticking rubber to canvas. If anyone is good at reading old patents,
please let me know what this technique
was. Dunlop was a former vet who's first business idea was to
market sheep gut as a pneumatic tyre, but soon decided that vegan
materials were better. By the 1930s the company patents were
running out and Green Flash became one of the first attempts
to differentiate a trainer by advertising and endorsement by
Fred Perry, the Wimbledon-winning tennis player. His company
survived on a large scale till the 1970s after which the brand
name has been bought and sold for different products such as
these shoes, sports equipment, and even Dunlop microfibre slippers
made in Spain and sold on the slippers
page.. Still sold in smaller shoe shops, the shoes were re-launched
as a retro fashion brand with the help of an add-agency: 
"In order to breathe life into the brand we took on a
completely new position in the youth market and positioned the
product as a "club" brand. With the targeted use of
guerrilla & tactical marketing we were able to place the
product in front of the aspirational club audiences and establish
the brand as a "must have". Night projection, fly-posting,
club DJ sponsorship, cutting edge POS and viral marketing campaigns
formed the core of this highly successful 3 year break."
Aspirational may not be quite the right word. The charm of
Dunlop trainers - like Converse in the USA - is that they are
not trying to be something else; they are cool because they are
uncool. They request that the wearer should be judged in some
other way than price, polish, or recentness of the shoe design.
Since re-launch another company has bought the brand and put
strange green slip-streams round the lettering, perhaps to suggest
supersonic speed. And embroidered a Wimbledon pavilion above
the laces, with dragon-like banners either side.
 Demonstration
slides (suit broadband connections):
1 ironing the laces
2 protecting your green flash
in the loo
3 looking after your shoes
at night
4 protecting your green flash
in the kitchen
British-made laces in other colours than white or green are
available from shoestringuk.co.uk
- (uk.co.uk ending) and any 90cm-100cm lace will fit.
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