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Alive & kicking
Independent, The (London), Jun 25, 2007 by Josh Sims
Madonna wore them. So did the Pope and Tony Benn. Worshipped by an equally diverse variety of youth cultures, their alternative chic - not to mention hard-wearing build - gave them a credibility among everyone from students to policemen.
Recent years have not been so kind to Dr Martens footwear, however. During a dark four-year period in the late 1990s, annual sales plummeted from [pound]250m to a low of just [pound]90m. Even postmen stopped wearing them, with the Post Office cancelling its long-standing contract; London Underground workers remain one of the company's last blue-collar customers.
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This turn of events was born out of years of arrogance, of ignoring design and marketing input, and of thinking like a manufacturing business - factory after factory tooled up to make the same thing - as opposed to a brand. "Fashion changes and we didn't see it coming," says David Suddens, who since 2002 has been the CEO of R Griggs, the Midlands company that owns the Dr Martens brand.
The last five years have been a hard ride for Dr Martens, which will be 50 at the end of this decade. All but one factory - in Wollaston - has been closed, and 2,000 jobs cut. Meanwhile, for the first time, manufacturing agreements have been signed in China. That may be sacrilege to those who think of the Dr Martens boot as a quintessentially British product. "We did get complaints, people saying they'd never wear DMs again," says Suddens. But this tough - and some may say inevitable - decision seems to be paying off. [pound]40m of debt has been repaid, and sales, which had been static for three years, are creeping up.
"There's every sign that there's a resurgence for DMs and the look it embodies," says Suddens. "Retailers are coming to us demanding the product, and they mean right now. The prestigious likes of Fred Segal are requesting it, the fashion industry is talking about it, the shoes are on the catwalk and there are new designer tie-ins."
Chloe recently cited Dr Martens as an inspiration, and designer Gareth Pugh used them for a recent catwalk show. Perhaps the greatest accolade, however, came in the brand's collaboration with the esteemed Japanese designer, Yohji Yamamoto. He included Docs in his autumn/winter 2005 show, and subsequently approached the brand to create a limited-edition range of Yamamoto-tweaked designs that will be available through his stores from August. "DMs are really cool," says Yamamoto. "My first experience with Dr Martens was 30 years ago when I bought a pair of eight-hole boots and was amazed that when I put my feet in, it was like I wasn't wearing any shoes at all. Nothing hurt, as you might expect with a pair of leather boots. They felt like an old pair of shoes and that immediately won my respect."
Big DM fan though he is, Yamamoto is perhaps donning a pair of rose-tinted sun-nies with his black Docs. Until recent changes to the design, wearers had to endure "months of pain" as Suddens puts it. This was the price paid for breaking in a pair of DMs - and also one reason that owners felt such attachment to them once they had softened up.
Certainly Dr Martens were revolutionarily comfortable compared to other work boots when they were created. Although considered a British product, the famed Airwair sole was a German invention - courtesy of one Dr Klaus Maertens, a doctor in the German army. While on leave from the front in 1943, he injured his foot in a skiing accident, and while convalescing attempted to create an air- filled material that would support his painful foot better than the boots he owned.
The idea came to fruition when Maertens teamed up with mechanical engineer Dr Herbert Funck. Using rubber that had been abandoned at Luftwaffe airfields, they created a method by which the sole was heat-sealed rather than stitched onto the shoe, making air-tight compartments underfoot. Think Nike Air, almost 30 years before Nike.
The DM had inauspicious beginnings, initially marketed as a gardening shoe for older ladies. It was not until 1960 that the Griggs family shoe business - which had been making boots for the British army during the war, even as the German army's Dr Maertens was at home designing his new boot - acquired the exclusive manufacturing rights. The company made design changes that would define the DM's characteristic look: the bulbous shape, ribbed welt and yellow stitching. They also anglicised the name to Dr Martens. On 1 April 1960, the company released the 1460 - the classic, eight- holed cherry red boot. The 1461 derby shoe came a year later.
They soon developed into a key fashion icon. Punk, goth and grunge fans have all adopted the boot, as have hordes of influential bands from The Who to The Clash, Slade to Madness. Teen girls discovered they didn't have to dress prettily; skinheads, both the original working-class ska fanatics and the nationalistic variety, snapped them up; football hooligans found the steel toe-caps so useful that at one point in the 1970s the police made supporters abandon their DMs outside the stadiums. The story of DMs is rife with cultural associations that some brands might fight shy of but which Dr Martens rightly embraces as a rich heritage few brands ever achieve.
