Jamie Thomas on the Fallen Footwear ending: - factory burned down, - moldy shoes, - financial crisis | Boardstation.de - Skateboard News, Videos and more

At some point it just wasn't worth it anymore, Jamie Thomas had to close his Fallen Footwear Company. The company had experienced very good times between 2003 and 2016. As Jamie Thomas explained to Nine To Five host Chris Roberts, there were several accidents that greatly influenced the company's demise.

In the company's last few years, the shoe business had changed significantly thanks to Nike and Adidas. But that would have been manageable if there hadn't been some unforeseeable accidents!

The problems really started when Fallen's shoe factory burned down. "The shoe factory burned down, we missed an entire season... and we couldn't produce a replacement in the window that would have been necessary...". This means that all shoe models for the next collection were burned and Thomas was unable to deliver any goods to the skate shops and online mail orders.

That alone is rough. But it got worse!

Months later, another complete season's collection of shoes was delivered damaged. The Fallen shoes were shipped from the production company to the USA by sea and something went wrong during the transport. The sea air damaged the entire shipment, mold was in and on the shoes! Another total failure for Fallen.

Then in 2008 came the financial crisis and the oil price rose massively, the production costs for Fallen Footwear went up. Jamie Thomas and his people therefore had to look for new factories that could produce shoes of the same quality and still be significantly cheaper. But the search went wrong. At the same time, Nike, Adidas and other mainstream companies have been able to maintain the quality of their shoes while continuing to produce them cheaply. Thomas comments: "Your quality goes down, then you have Nike, Adidas, Vans and Converse, which spend a lot of marketing dollars and have the best skate teams ever... your quality goes down and there are delays in production and delivery... ".

Another problem that Thomas unfortunately recognized too late, as he says himself, was Fallen Footwear's independence. "In the end it was just too little and much too late" to save the company.

How exactly that happened with Fallen can be heard on the Nine Club (from 3.09.00 minute).