Foot's Paradise

Jennifer the Valley Girl, whose most strenuous exercise consists of cruising the local shopping mall, favors $64 pink L.A. Gear athletic shoes with Western-style, imitation-silver buckles. Arthur the accountant, who bicycles ten miles before picking up his calculator in the morning, wears TC Lite, Nike's $85 cycling model. His weekend tennis partner rushes the net in Reebok's $80 Italian-made Cosenza tennis shoes, with the brand name discreetly scrawled in the corner.

Only fuddy-duddies still think of sneakers as inexpensive, all-purpose athletic shoes with heavy rubber soles. Today's models are an exacting mixture of fashion and technology, composed of such materials as synthetic leather and Hexalite, a cushiony substance used in Reebok's newest soles. Not just athletic shoes, they are space-age wonders that boast such features as air- cylinder suspension systems, anatomically molded ankle collars, outrigger soles and adjustable support straps. They answer to names like Air Skylon, 360 Jam, Disc-Drive and Tiger Gel Epirus. Manufacturers are bombarding customers with different models for "technical" and "nontechnical" running, for walking, wrestling and even coaching and cheerleading.

As a result, Americans are lacing up 200 million pairs of brand-name athletic shoes a year. Not satisfied to sell only shoes, companies are diversifying into T shirts, sweaters and shorts emblazoned with their names. All told, the market for athletic shoes will reach $9 billion in retail sales this year, up about 15% from 1988. In a grueling race for market share, once sagging Nike is racing back with revenues of $1.7 billion for the fiscal year that ended in May. Analysts estimate that Nike now claims a 26% share of the market for brand-name athletic shoes. Based in Beaverton, Ore., the company is nosing ahead of its archrival Reebok, which controls about 22% of the market. Striding into the No. 3 position is trendy L.A. Gear, which has grabbed about 13% by selling shoes designed more for fashion than performance. Among the runners-up: Converse, Adidas, Keds and New Balance.

When the jogging and fitness craze began in the mid-1970s, athletic-shoe manufacturers were dubbed "Adidas and the Seven Dwarfs." But by the early 1980s, while West Germany's Adidas remained No. 1 outside the U.S., fast- rising Nike dominated the American market. The company was started in 1972 by current chairman Philip Knight, 52, a University of Oregon graduate, and Bill Bowerman, 78, his former track coach, who used a waffle iron to make their first soles. (The now famous Swoosh trademark on the side of the shoes was designed by an art student for $35.) Nike's sales sprinted from $270 million in 1980 to $920 million in 1984. But the firm, named after the Greek goddess of victory, had trouble managing its explosive growth. Not long after the company tried to meet increased demand by assigning more production to Chinese factories in 1985, Nike's quality inspectors were rejecting four out of five of the Chinese-made shoes. Nike's push to satisfy the expanding mass market eroded its performance image.