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CamperSome Camper shoes look like they were stolen from a bowling alley. Others have messages inscribed on their soles. With certain styles, the right and left shoes don't match. On purpose. Yet for more than a decade, this quirky footwear company has racked up more sales in its native Spain than any other casual-shoe brand. Now the company is going global, with stores in London, Milan, New York, Paris, and Taiwan. Last year, sales topped $120 million -- more than 3 million pairs of shoes sold. The industry's leading trade publication, Footwear News, named Camper "fashion brand of the year," and all kinds of celebrities -- from Woody Allen to Rosie O'Donnell to Robert Redford to Bruce Willis -- kick around in the unique shoes. It's not the largest shoe company in the world nor the most visible. But it is arguably the most unusual and, for the moment at least, the hottest shoe company on Earth. It all starts with Camper's sense of place -- geography, culture, and history. In an economy dominated by design, and in an industry propelled by design hype, Camper's geocentric approach offers both an important antidote to and an interesting lesson in authentic design and counterintuitive marketing. You start to learn the Camper story from a travelogue that comes with every pair of shoes. It's usually printed on an attached tag or in an accompanying brochure. The words or pictures may vary, but the message is clear: These shoes come from Majorca (Mallorca, to Spaniards), a Spanish island in the Mediterranean. "Camper" means "peasant" in Catalan, and the shoes are inspired by farmer footwear and steeped in island tradition. The tale is effective as a source code for the product and as a marketing tool to the world. Lorenzo Fluxá, who started Camper in 1975, has always said that it's better to build a brand around old-fashioned ideas than to try to be fashion-forward. "When people call us a 'fashion brand,' it offends me," says Fluxá, 54. "We don't like the fashion world at all. We're trying not to take ourselves too seriously." Plenty of fashion designers insist that their clothes are timeless, but few actually craft their product from the attributes that exist entirely within their own time zone -- without regard to outside taste or opinion. "Some people try to tell us what kind of product to make," says Guillermo Ferrer, 45, Camper's design director and all-purpose muse. "We appreciate their opinions, but we usually say, 'No thank you.' We make Majorcan shoes. If they don't want our product, we accept their decision, close the factory, and go home." And yet these shoes, which are created out of the company's strong sense of itself and are rich in local character, have become globally chic. In a marketing flip worthy of the new economy, Camper's old-economy unwillingness to compromise has made it hot. Camper is design with a comfortable twist and a wink. And every day, more and more urban dwellers are slipping on their Campers and winking right back.
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