Thursday, April 15, 2004
THE ANTI-NIKE: You might have heard of AdBusters, and wonder to yourself "Well, sure, they make a lot of noise, but are they doing anything practical?" Well, they're going into production with blackSpot Sneakers, or the "un-swoosher". While there's apparently a bit of a holdup in getting started, that's because they're going in for a "clean" shop (read: no 12 year olds running machines for 16 hours a day, preferably unionized). Nothing utterly insane in the actual shoe either, just a simple, low-top canvas shoe with a black dot in the center of a white circle where the logo would be.
A lot of people see this as a curious angle, an anti-branding organization making its own brand, but Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn doesn't see it that way. ''There are a lot of people now who want to jump over the dead body of the old left,'' he recently told a reporter. ''We've decided to stop whining about Nike. Why not make $10 million and use it to run a media-literacy campaign instead? I'm really sick of the whiners.'' Well, if you're gonna dream, dream big. Coming from a region that was traditionally neck deep in textile workers until the outsource mentality took the industry over, it's kind of rough that they can't share some business on the continent (Adbusters is based in Canada), but they are looking for people to sell them in "alternative venues".
(Edit on 4/21: After a little extra reading, I found out they were considering a plant in America bought by ex-Nike workers after the mother ship called it home, and while Lasn digs the idea of taking over a Nike shop, he's a globalist at heart and doesn't feel it's necessary to keep these types of jobs in North America. This was all from the press archive on the blackDot site, which is preserving all points of view on the new venture.)
A lot of people see this as a curious angle, an anti-branding organization making its own brand, but Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn doesn't see it that way. ''There are a lot of people now who want to jump over the dead body of the old left,'' he recently told a reporter. ''We've decided to stop whining about Nike. Why not make $10 million and use it to run a media-literacy campaign instead? I'm really sick of the whiners.'' Well, if you're gonna dream, dream big. Coming from a region that was traditionally neck deep in textile workers until the outsource mentality took the industry over, it's kind of rough that they can't share some business on the continent (Adbusters is based in Canada), but they are looking for people to sell them in "alternative venues".
(Edit on 4/21: After a little extra reading, I found out they were considering a plant in America bought by ex-Nike workers after the mother ship called it home, and while Lasn digs the idea of taking over a Nike shop, he's a globalist at heart and doesn't feel it's necessary to keep these types of jobs in North America. This was all from the press archive on the blackDot site, which is preserving all points of view on the new venture.)
|| Eric 4:46 PM#
