Australian brand outlasts Kanye West with new performance sneakers
When Australian fashion brand Song For The Mute joined the adidas family in 2022, it was the most distant of relations. Rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, was the big daddy at the table, with a multibillion-dollar deal for his Yeezy brand.
Months later, antisemitic comments by Ye saw his adidas deal in tatters and the German sportswear brand burdened with €1.2billion ($2 billion) in unsold stock. It was hardly a gap that the under-the-radar Song For The Mute, launched in 2010, was expected to fill.
“When we started it was only supposed to be a small partnership for the APAC [Asia Pacific] market,” says co-founder Melvyn Tan. “The order was for 3000 shoes, which seemed massive for us.
“It sold out within minutes.”
Since then, Tan and co-founder and creative director Lyna Ty have nurtured their relationship with adidas across six collections, and now sit at the designer family table alongside the new Hermes menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner, Willy Chavarria and the new big daddy, Bad Bunny.
They have outlasted Ye but still need to fight for attention at adidas, especially when Bad Bunny has the resources to launch his adidas sneakers at the Super Bowl. When it came to producing their next collection for the brand, they had to change the game.
“We started questioning how we continue to ride this wave and give markets something that’s unexpected,” Tan says.
Until today, Tan and Ly had stuck to the spectator side of sport, with designer sneakers made for strolling the shopping strips of Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo, that spoke to the textural richness and urban sophistication of their clothing. “China is our biggest market for the collaborations followed by Korea, Japan and the US,” Tan says.
This time they decided to find their inner athlete and design performance sneakers and sportswear.
“We pitched it to them that over the upcoming collections the range will evolve as we do as runners,” Tan says. “This collection is for people who are starting their running journey, like us, and want the right shoe to help them do that.”
While some commentators say that sneakerhead culture has peaked, with the return of formal footwear to fashion frontlines, the performance market remains strong.
“In the last five years, with the growth of running as a sport and hobby, new avenues have opened up for lifestyle-related collaborations like this,” says Patrick Monti, general manager of Melbourne sneaker store Up There. “We don’t see that slowing down at all.”
Adidas agrees, and has signed SFTM for another four collections, making them a close second to Wales Bonner as the longest-running fashion partner, outside the Y3 and Stella McCartney mainline ranges.
When asked the size of their orders now, compared with the original 3000 sneakers, Tan humbly evades a clear answer.
“We are just happy seeing our dream come true,” Tan says. “It’s not about making noise.”
If only Ye had realised that.
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