Adidas shoe pays homage to PolsonBy VINCE DEVLIN
Missoulian
POLSON, Mont. (AP) -- Anyone with about 60 bucks can now walk a mile and more in Polson's shoes. And ride a skateboard in them, too.
Adidas has named a shoe after the town. The Polson ST, a combination of tennis and basketball shoe designs that makes it well-suited for skateboarders too, debuted in March. How did the world's second-leading sportswear manufacturer come to name one of its shoes after a small town in western Montana? "The way it came about is, as we develop a new product, we solicit suggestions of names from people who work here," says George Cutright, who works as a marketing communications specialist for Adidas in Portland, Ore. Cutright had suggested several names before, and been shot down. "I don't remember what they were," he says, "but they obviously weren't good enough." But when the 1998 Polson High School graduate nominated the name of the town where he lived from the ages of 13 to 18, Adidas liked what it saw. "It looked good on the shoe," Cutright says. "You don't want a name that's real long, anyway, and 'Polson' fit with the esthetics of the shoe." Hence, the Polson ST, inspired by Adidas classics such as the Campus, the Ultrastar and the Forest Hills, with the added twist of a basketball sole. It probably didn't hurt that Adidas could market the shoe as being named after "a small northwest Montana town with a big skate park."
When Cutright was a teenager here, he and his friends had to build ramps on an abandoned foundation and concrete slab on an otherwise empty lot in town to enjoy skateboarding. "We built ramps, put them out there and called it our skate park," Cutright says. "They let it go until they sold it, and then they put up notices that we'd have to move the ramps by a certain date or they'd do it for us." When he comes back to Polson these days and Cutright hopes to make the trip again this summer, for his 10-year high school reunion he brings along his skateboard. "It's so cool to see they've got a world-class skate park now," Cutright says of the town's Seventh Avenue Skate Park. "It's a real step up from our old homemade one."
After graduating from high school, Cutright attended the University of Colorado, where he majored in business management. He worked in the skateboarding industry before joining Adidas a year and a half ago. "It's a great company to work for, and Portland is a great city to live in," Cutright says. "It's worked out really good."
It's still early, Cutright says, but the numbers look good for the recently launched Polson ST. "It was only released a month and a half ago," he says, "but the initial read is that it's doing very well. The sell-through numbers are looking good." The Polson ST will remain in Adidas' product line through 2009, with new color combinations being added each season. The first ones, now available in stores and online, are either black with white stripes, or a white-orange-green combo.
Information from: Missoulian,
http://www.missoulian.com
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