The Tipping Point
F
or Hush Puppies — the classic American
brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe
sole —- the Tipping Point came somewhere
between late 1994 and early 1995. The brand
had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to
30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and
small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that
makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the
shoes that made them famous. But then something strange
happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives — Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis — ran into a
stylist from New York who told them that the classic
Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and
bars of downtown Manhattan. "We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were resale shops in the Village,
in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were
going to the Ma and Pa stores, the little stores that still
carried them, and buying them up." Baxter and Lewis
