Sneaker Freaker Issue #49, Nike 'The One Line' & Happy Holidays!

Sup everyone and seasons greetings to you!🎅🎄 The blog has have been offline for awhile during the process of moving. This will likely be the last post of 2023 and I wanted to use it to send a shout out to Minh Vuong, Woody and the team over at the mighty Sneaker Freaker magazine. SF issue #49 is out now and has a ton of great articles, including a write up on the rare Nike 'The One Line' bootleg sneakers. Y'all should check it out if you get a chance and you can pick it up here.

Lastly, The Deffest blog has a lot of good stuff we're working on for 2024. Thanks to everyone shopping over at RewindRunning.com and who picked up some old school runners in the eBay auctions this year. Hope everyone has Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year. See you all in the two-fo. Cheers.

GEM.app: Running With Style - Five Little Known Sneaker Brands

Just putting up a quick post to share a write up for our vintage friends over at GEM.app called ‘Five Little Known Sneaker Brands.’ While many of the brands from the article have gone away, there are still a lot of very cool one-of-a-kind vintage sneakers out there that can be found on GEM app, which brings all the best vintage products to one place. For those of you that are fellow vintage gear hunters we love this app and highly recommend it. If you’re interested in the sneakers featured in the post most of them are for sale at our vintage shops RewindRunning.com and DeffestShop.com.

Complex Sneakers: How Nike Bootlegged Its Own Sneakers

MARCH 2022 UPDATE: These Nike ‘One Line’ shoes will be posted for sale by auction with Heritage Auctions between April 7 - April 20, 2022. Please check the Heritage Auctions website at HA.com if you are interested in buying them.

Putting up a quick post to give a shout out to the team over at Complex sneakers for covering the ultra rare Nike ‘One Line’ sneakers. If you have time you should check out the article ‘How Nike Bootlegged Its Own Sneakers’ by Tim Newcomb at the Complex website.

For more on the history of the obscure Nike ‘One Line’ brand you can check out our blog post ‘The Rarest Nike Shoes Ever Don't Even Have A Swoosh.’ These sneakers have an extraordinarily strange history and helped to save Nike from going out of business back in the day.

February Update

February 7th was the 3rd anniversary of the founding of the Deffest vintage sneaker blog and with it the opportunity to consider everything posted so far and what comes next. The vintage sneaker shop is now open and will begin to be updated regularly soon. We’re also going to take some time to rework, revise, edit, and update some old post content where needed. This will take some time but if you find broken links or errors on any pages feel free to hit us up on the contact page. Thanks to everyone who drops by here everyday to check out the blog.

Eddie Van Halen's 1970's 'W' logo sneakers

October 2021 UPDATE: This mystery has been solved. The W logo sneakers below are Pro-Wings brand. Thanks again to =VH= fan Allen Garber who figured this out.

I have received a ton of emails and messages asking about these Eddie Van Halen W logo sneakers in the photo by Neil Zlozower below so I figured I ought to put up a post about them. A few of us have looked into these sneakers and brand for awhile and we have had a couple of leads but no official confirmation.

Image Credit: Eddie Van Halen photo by Neil Zlozower. You can buy prints from Neil’s website here.

My first best guess was vintage Weider Sport Shoes. There is a pair of these up on eBay right now here

Weider sport shoes W logo sneakers. Image credit to ebay.

The W logo on those is not as pointy as Eddie Van Halen’s sneakers so we pretty much ruled them out. Next up we were trying to figure out if a factory was bootlegging Mizuno’s old M logo and flipped it upside down like Kinney shoes did with the Nike swoosh back in the day.

Mizuno MR1 - Image credit to tokyosports.com.hk

But that theory proved to be wrong as the logos are still a mismatch.

The latest development as we were told from a friend on Instagram is that these are 1970’s Kmart brand sneakers, possibly Trax brand. Kmart used a bunch of different profile logos back in the day which you can see here. We have not spotted the W logo yet but are trying to find an old ad for it. Once we find it we’ll update this post.

A couple of final thoughts - first off, big shout out to rock n’ roll photographer Neil Zlozower for capturing these iconic photos of Van Halen. You can buy Van Halen and other great rock band prints from Neil’s website here. 🤘🤘

Finally, RIP to rock n’ roll legend Eddie Van Halen. The man was a one-of-a-kind shredder and Van Halen made some killer albums together.

Sears the Winner retro sneakers by Warehouse Company (Japan)

A couple of weeks ago I posted the Adidas and Converse side by side of the Sears the Winner kicks and mentioned the original sneakers from the early 70s sell for between $1500 - $2800 now. It turns out that a company in Japan called "Warehouse Company" is still putting the 4 strips Converse version of these out and they sell for about $100. This images are from a Rakuten store called "CLEVER WEB SHOP" but unfortunately their inventory is currently sold out. Shout out to @secondhand_nate for this passing along the info on Warehouse Company.

Sears the Winner 1974 vintage shoes by Converse AND Adidas

Another sneaker mystery... one of the readers of the blog emailed this over (thanks to Susan S for the photo) so I wanted to post it. The left image is from the 1974 Sears Fall catalog for Simpsons-Sears in Canada. What's odd is that these Sears the Winner shoes there were made by Adidas while the identical shoe model from the same year in the right side of the image was made by Converse for the US market. The Adidas Canadian version have 3 stripes and the Converse have 4. Either way, we've seen these sneakers for sale online for between $1500 - $2800 so if anyone spots a pair at your local thrift shop you should probably scoop them up.

Here’s another catalog image from Sears in 1976 where the adidas Winner line is featured.