Minimalist Footwear Thread

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K5 Gus Aug 2018 10:54am, 5 Aug 2018 2,656 posts	0 K5 Gus flanker - that screen shot you've put up looks like what I get if I hover the mouse over "Road Running" in the top navigation bar. If you hover over "Trail Running" then you may find the stuff you're looking for - fell running, mud running, mountain running, etc, etc
flanker Aug 2018 4:24pm, 6 Aug 2018 17,744 posts	0 flanker Gus - i realised that after I posted it that somehow I'd captured the wrong part of the screen! What I meant to capture was the categories for men's shoes (below). There still seems to be a glaring omission...
K5 Gus Aug 2018 8:39pm, 6 Aug 2018 2,658 posts	0 K5 Gus Yeah, looks a strange way they've named their shoe range, splitting into 3 broad disciplines - Road, Trail, Training, with all the fell and mountain shoes under Trail. To me, would have been better as Road, Off-Road and Fitness, then could have had Trail as a sub category of Off-Road. Maybe it's an international branding thing where Trail means something slightly different in US and Aus which are 2 of their biggest markets ?
flanker Aug 2018 11:55pm, 6 Aug 2018 17,746 posts	0 flanker Or they could have stuck with what got them to the place they are, and is probably still the mainstay of their business: 'fell' Trail abroad tends to mean totally benign footpaths on step away from being tarmac.
flyingfinn Aug 2018 8:56am, 7 Aug 2018 1,092 posts	0 flyingfinn Fell long ceased to be the mainstay of Inov8s business. It may be where they started but for a good number of years their biggest market has been the US and they have a huge market in places like Japan as a fashion brand (hence the Japanese ownership). Sadly they could lose all their fell customers tomorrow and the business wouldn't really notice (in 2014 they had sales in 70 countries worth around £19M and they've grown since then) and I would suspect that fell runners don't even form the majority of their business in the UK. The website is targetted at their international market not a small minority of us running round the hills in the northern part of the UK.
SSLHP (Shoes smell like horse piss) Aug 2018 12:13pm, 7 Aug 2018 372 posts	0 SSLHP (Shoes smell like horse piss) Why would you need Graphine on a fitness shoe?
RichHL Aug 2018 1:13pm, 7 Aug 2018 13,125 posts	0 RichHL You wouldn't.
flyingfinn Aug 2018 2:25pm, 7 Aug 2018 1,093 posts	0 flyingfinn I didn't say Inov8 don't make fell shoes, they actually make some very good ones. What I said is that is no longer the mainstay of the company and hasn't been for quite some while. Over ten years ago Wayne Edy the founder of Inov8 went on record as saying that he took the company international asap after it's launch in 2003 because a company based on selling to UK mountain (fell) runners wasn't sustainable. That people buy functional shoes as fashion isn't something I get bit they do, often in much bigger quantities than those that buy them for their designed use. And if want an illustration of that phenomenon just visit Ambleside any Saturday afternoon and observe the value of the serious mountain kit being used for little more than getting from the car park to the cafe.
Velociraptor Aug 2018 2:31pm, 7 Aug 2018 38,814 posts	0 Velociraptor Or even visit Workington on a weekday and observe that most people who are past their teens dress in low-to-mid-range outdoor brands, with New Balance on their feet.
flanker Aug 2018 2:44pm, 7 Aug 2018 17,749 posts	0 flanker to be fair they probably got them cheap from the NB factory shop vrap ;-). (or knock-off chinese copies from the market!) ff, standing in the queue on the steps to the apple pie shop most definitely requires proper mountaineering gear. Buying the expensive kit - the easy alternative to actually getting out on the fells.