The Wall Street Journal-20080201-A Walk on the Wild Side- Florsheim Picks Duckie Brown for Shoe Line
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A Walk on the Wild Side; Florsheim Picks Duckie Brown for Shoe Line
Full Text (911 words)In the fashion industry's latest odd-couple pairing, century-old shoe company Florsheim, known for its wingtips, has chosen edgy menswear designer Duckie Brown, known for its sequins, to create a line of men's dress shoes.
Florsheim, a unit of Weyco Group Inc., is sponsoring Duckie Brown's fall fashion show in New York today, where the models will sport traditional Florsheim shoes with their designer creations. The Milwaukee-based shoe company hopes to reinvigorate its mid-tier brand with its planned premium line by Duckie Brown's co-designers, to be introduced in summer 2009. Florsheim wouldn't disclose financial terms of the collaboration announced today.
Florsheim isn't the first stodgy middle-market brand seeking to appeal to younger, hipper customers by collaborating with cutting-edge designers. Last year, the venerable Brooks Brothers started premium men's and women's collections by Thom Browne, a menswear designer best known for ankle-baring gray flannel suits with cropped jackets. Kohl's Corp. began selling clothes and accessories created by Vera Wang. And Samsonite Corp. added luggage by British designer Alexander McQueen.
Still, the Duckie Brown-Florsheim pairing stands out. The designers, Steven Cox from London and Daniel Silver from Toronto, are known for sending particularly outlandish styles down the runway. John Florsheim, president of Weyco Group and the Florsheim unit, attended Duckie Brown's New York fashion show last September and got an eyeful: male models in shirtdresses, gold-lame sequin hoodies and trousers decorated with giant peonies.
"I was kind of shocked," says the 44-year-old Mr. Florsheim, who tried to blend in with the fashionistas at the show by wearing jeans and a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Florsheim had sponsored the show and supplied shoes for some of the models.
Florsheim executives learned of the Duckie Brown team from an item in the New Yorker magazine this past June about a New Jersey high- school senior who asked the designers to make a prom suit for him; they did -- and sent along a pair of Florsheim shoes that they had used in a runway show for him to wear with it.
The Duckie Brown label has annual sales of only $1 million and is carried in only about 18 stores world-wide. Mr. Florsheim says the company considered bigger names but decided to go with an "up-and- coming" designer brand "that's a little less predictable."
He acknowledges that he was nervous about how Duckie Brown's style would translate at Florsheim, but also saw the two companies had some things in common. "They are unconventional but at the same time they are classic in a lot of ways, classic with an edge," Mr. Florsheim says. "They have this English hand-tailored traditional thing going on so they have a respect for heritage and the classic."
The Duckie Brown deal is one of several steps Florsheim has taken to introduce new styles and revive the shoe company. The brand, founded by the Florsheim family in 1892, was sold in 1952. Weyco Group, headed by Chief Executive Thomas Florsheim, bought the brand out of bankruptcy in 2002. Thomas Florsheim and his brother John are descendants of the founding family. In 2006, wholesale sales of Florsheim shoes rose 15% from the year earlier, to $58 million.
The average customer for Florsheim's leather dress shoes is around 50 years old. The company is aiming its Florsheim by Duckie Brown line at men in their 30s and 40s, and prices will range from $200 to $300, compared with $100 for the average Florsheim shoe now. The company hopes it will sell in more upscale stores than the midprice chains now selling its shoes. Florsheim's 39 self-standing U.S. stores also will sell the new line.
Collaborations like these have produced mixed results. Sales of Mr. Browne's women's apparel at Brooks Brothers have been disappointing, though the men's line has exceeded expectations.
Messrs. Cox and Silver arrived in Milwaukee in early January toting a bright-red suitcase full of sketches and samples to pitch to the Florsheim brothers and their design team. Mr. Cox showed up wearing a dark-red overcoat and brick-red Hermes lace-up shoes. Mr. Silver wore a navy-blue puffy jacket, a fluorescent orange-and-yellow striped knit cap and clunky Red Wing boots. They found that the Florsheim designers had their own style. They were dressed like "trendy snowboard guys," Mr. Silver says.
Florsheim's 760,000 square-foot warehouse made a big impression on the designers, who work out of a cramped 1,250-square-foot loft in New York's West Village.
Though Messrs. Cox and Silver haven't designed shoes before and Mr. Cox admits he didn't know the difference between a wingtip and a brogue, he says the new Florsheim shoes will be "beautiful" -- not "pink with red polka-dot lining, as some might expect."
The designs the duo presented to Florsheim in January include classic black and brown dress shoes. But the designers also want to make shoes in unusual colors like "smoke gray," "army green" and navy blue, as well as two-toned styles and some with high-contrast stitching. The logo they proposed for the inner linings and soles is a marriage of Florsheim's crest and their own of a rooster standing on a crown.
John Florsheim says "they looked at Florsheim and turned up the music a bit." In fact, when the Florsheim folks suggested that, to achieve a modern look, the designers try a narrower, pointier European design, Messrs. Cox and Silver dismissed that idea as dated and said traditional looks were now fashionable. Florsheim's technically trained shoe designers are now tweaking the duo's designs.
