How do you solve a problem like Grenson? That was the question when Tim Little, the current owner of the brand first came on board as their creative director. It sounds like an easy task now, but things were rather different when he joined the company. Not to paint a dystopian view of a world that was only half a decade ago, but it was a very different period for shoes. The menswear explosion hadn't happened yet and, therefore, the shoe porn explosion hadn't happened yet. All in all, it wasn't a surefire success. So what made Little come on board? "I love these brands that have a real story and heritage behind them but the people who own them can't see it."

Little had experience of brands in this position. While he still worked in advertising in the 90's, adidas became one of his clients. He worked on adidas for four years in total. "It was such a massive account that I had to get rid of all my other accounts and just work on that. It was really exciting that because at the time adidas was just being completely beaten out by Nike, and it'd just lost that place as the number one sports brand in the world."

But, like most things that are seen as deeply uncool in the mainstream, there were small pockets of people who were bringing back the brand in their own way. "Duffer, which was one little shop at the time [around 1992-93], were buying old adidas originals from America and bringing them over and putting them in the store." says Little. "And we'd go there and look at what they were doing and say 'well, where did you get these from?' and they'd say 'we buy them from America'. So we called adidas in Germany and they wouldn't make them. They said 'they're old fashioned, that's our old image' and we went to them and said 'these are so hot, these shoes, the shell toe'. These are really hot and you've gotta bring them back because this will bring the whole brand back. And eventually they did. But it took a long time."

He says that at the time, adidas was mainly associated with 'discount' shellsuits' and it was only a few people, like Duffer, who were bringing back Gazelles and shell toes from America, building an underground buzz. This was long before the internet, so trends took much longer to get noticed and companies had a tougher time of tracking such things, which was one of the reasons why adidas were so reticent. "It's often the case that people on the street rediscover the brand and they know more about what's cool about a brand than the people who run the brand."

"We'd say to adidas 'do you know what's happening?' and they'd say 'yeah but it's really worried about it because people are just gonna buy those and they're not gonna buy the new shoes. They're not gonna see us as a serious sports brand'. Little explained the popularity of the shoes that were being imported and eventually adidas agreed to do a small run of shoes with little to no fanfare. And this was how adidas Originals first launched.