Here’s 14 Things You Didn’t Know about Airwalk Shoes! Things like when Airwalk shoes come out, the logo, the team, commercials, ads, and even what happened to airwalk shoes. We’ll even answer the questions of if Airwalk shoes even still exist anymore.
It’s crazy to think that Airwalk actually started as a Jazzercise company trying to break into the running and exercise world.
Then, Bill Mann realized that his son, who was skateboarding at the time, was wearing through his shoes really quick. Bill realized that skateboarding was a big and growing market, and he wanted to get in on it: So Airwalk was founded, and they began producing some of the first shoes ever with with lace savers; some of the first Airwalk shoes even kind of looked like Converse shoes!
Bill Mann sits down with Sin Egelja, a skateboard photographer from Australia who was working at the Del Mar skatepark. Sin approaches Tony Hawk with the idea of starting a skateboard shoe brand and putting Tony on the team. Garry Davis, an art director at Transworld, comes up with the name Airwalk as the name for the shoe brand.
In interviews about his shoe sponsors, Tony Hawk talks about skating in Air Jordan 1s early on, getting sneaker deals, and potentially shoe sponsors with brands like Puma at the time, before going with Airwalk. Brands like Vans had an importance in skateboarding history at the time, but there was still lots of room for the brand to expand. Then, in the later 90’s, tony migrated on to Adio, and on from there.
Airwalk in its 1990’s prime had an amazing team: Tony Hawk, Jason lee, Rob dyrdek, Sluugo, Danny way, Geoff Rowley, Andrew Reynolds, Andy Mac, Bucky Lasek, Jesse Paez, Tom Knox, Jason Lee, Eric Koston and Christian Hosoi
In the early to mid 90’s, Airwalk produces some of its most iconic shoes like the Prototype, the One, the JIM, the NTS, and the Enigma.
In 1996, Airwalk comes out with a team video filmed by Jamie Mosburg, who also filmed the video “the end” for Tony’s brand birdhouse skateboards at the time.
It features some iconic team members, like Andrew Reynolds, Andy MacDonald, Bucky Lasek, Geoff Rowley, Steve Berra, Tom Knox (not the trendy UK Tom Knox), and Tony Hawk.
Airwalk was sponsoring all kinds of action sport at the time, and had their hands in vert skateboarding, surfing, bmx, motocross, mountain biking, and even basejumping.
In the 90’s, Airwalk fit into the top 5 for ad budgets and spending at the time.
They spend $30 million in 1995, and then they boost their ad budget to $40 million for 1996, as they expected sales to double in that year. Fighting with big players like Nike and Adidas, Airwalk was dumping money into ads to keep a core-status with youth.
They’ve created some wild commercials, like the bed commercial, the aliens commercial, or even the hardcore show commercial in 1996. This is on top of Airwalk promos that they’ve done with Jason Lee, Tony Hawk, Andrew Reynolds, and Geoff Rowley.
Now available on Payless Shoes, Footlocker, or nearly anywhere on Amazon.com, Airwalk would definetly be one of the cheapest skateboarding shoes on the internet.
After 1996, Airwalk began to slowly prioritize big box retail, and got pushed out of the skateboarding core community by other up and coming brands at the time, like Etnies and DC; quickly fitting into the many other sneaker brands you've forgotten about!
Now, Airwalk is back with the Airwalk classics program, working with Jeff Staple (designer of the Nike Pigeon Dunk) to bring you the same classic line. If you want to rep a 90’s look, go ahead, but we doubt that Airwalk would fit into the best skateboarding shoes in 2020.
