Rez4frederick
Active member
One of my homies from Polson is now the manager of the Adidas skateboarding team in Oregon. They came up with a new shoe design and he suggested naming the shoe the "Polson" and they accepted it!
Here is the story in the Missoulian, its probably a couple months old by now, but still check it!
Adidas shoe pays homage to Polson
By 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
And by the way, the skatejam is on for August 2nd, 2008
Here is the story in the Missoulian, its probably a couple months old by now, but still check it!
Adidas shoe pays homage to Polson
By 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
And by the way, the skatejam is on for August 2nd, 2008
