The Airwalk epidemic did not last. In 1997, the company's sales began to falter. The firm had production problems and difficulty filling their orders. In critical locations, Airwalk failed to supply enough products for the back-to-school season, and its once loyal distributors began to turn against it. At the same time, the company began to lose that cutting-edge sensibility that it had traded on for so long. "When Airwalk started, the product was directional and inventive. The shoes were very forward," said Chad Farmer. "We maintained the trendsetter focus on the marketing. But the product began to slip. The company began to listen more and more to the sales staff and the product started to get that homogenized, mainstream look. Everybody loved the marketing. In focus groups that we do, they still talk about how they miss it. But the number one complaint is what happened to the cool product?" Lambesis's strategy was based on translating Innovator shoes for the Majority. But suddenly Airwalk wasn't an Innovator shoe anymore. "We made another, critical mistake," Lee Smith, the former president of Airwalk says. "We had a segmentation strategy, where the small, independent core skate shops — the three hundred boutiques around the country that really created us — had a certain product line that was exclusive to them. They didn't want us to be in the mall. So what we did was we segmented our product. We said to the core shops, you don't have to compete with the malls. It worked out very well." The boutiques were given the technical shoes: different designs, better materials, more padding, different cushioning systems, different rubber compounds, more expensive uppers. "We had a special signature model — the Tony Hawk — for skateboarding, which was a lot beefier and more durable. It would retail for about eighty dollars." The shoes Airwalk distributed to Kinney's or Champ's or Foot Locker, meanwhile, were less elaborate and would retail for about $60. The Innovators always got to wear a different, more exclusive shoe than everyone else. The mainstream customer had the satisfaction of wearing the same brand as the cool kids.

But then, at the height of its success, Airwalk switched strategies. The company stopped giving the specialty shops their own shoes. "That's when the trendsetters started to get a disregard for the brand," says Farmer. "They started to go to their boutiques where they got their cool stuff, and they realized that everyone else could get the very same shoes at J C Penney." Now, all of a sudden, Lambesis was translating the language of mainstream products for the mainstream. The epidemic was over.

"My category manager once asked me what happened," Smith says, "and I told him, you ever see ForrestGump? Stupid is as stupid does. Well, cool is as cool does. Cool brands treat people well, and we didn't. I had personally promised some of those little shops that we would give them special product, then we changed our minds. That was the beginning. In that world, it all works on word of mouth. When we became bigger, that's when we should have paid more attention to the details and kept a good buzz going, so when people said you guys are sellouts, you guys went mainstream, you suck, we could have said, you know what, we don't. We had this little jewel of a brand, and little by little we sold that off into the mainstream, and once we had sold it all" — he paused — "so what? You buy a pair of our shoes. Why would you ever buy another?"

SEVEN

Case Study

SUICIDE, SMOKING, AND THE SEARCH FOR THE UNSTICKY CIGARETTE

Not long ago, on the South Pacific islands of Micronesia, a seventeen-year-old boy named Sima got into an argument with his father, He was staying with his family at his grandfather's house when his father — a stern and demanding man — ordered him out of bed early one morning and told him to find a bamboo pole-knife to harvest breadfruit. Sima spent hours in the village, looking without success for a pole knife, and when he returned empty-handed, his father was furious. The family would now go hungry, he told his son, waving a machete in rage. "Get out of here and go find somewhere else to live."

Sima left his grandfather's house and walked back to his home village. Along the way he ran into his fourteen-year-old brother and borrowed a pen. Two hours later, curious about where Sima had gone, his brother went looking for him. He returned to the now empty family house and peered in the window. In the middle of a dark room, hanging slack and still from a noose, was Sima. He was dead. His suicide note read:

My life is coming to an end at this time. Now today is a day of sorrow for me, also a day of suffering for me. But it is a day of celebration for Papa. Today Papa sent me away. Thank you for loving me so little. Sima. Give my farewell to Mama. Mama you won't have any more frustration or trouble from your boy. Much love from Sima.

In the early 1960s, suicide on the islands of Micronesia was almost unknown. But for reasons no one quite understands, it then began to rise, steeply and dramatically, by leaps and bounds every year, until by the end of the 1980s there were more suicides per capita in Micronesia than anywhere else in the world. For males between fifteen and twenty-four, the suicide rate in the United States is about 22 per 100,000. In the islands of Micronesia the rate is about 160 per 100,000 — more than seven times higher. At that level, suicide is almost commonplace, triggered by the smallest of incidents. Sima took his own life because his father yelled at him. In the midst of the Micronesian epidemic, that was hardly unusual. Teens committed suicide on the islands because they saw their girlfriends with another boy, or because their parents refused to give them a few extra dollars for beer. One nineteen-year-old hanged him because his parents didn't buy him a graduation gown. One seventeen-year-old hanged him because he had been rebuked by his older brother for making too much noise. What, in Western cultures, is something rare, random, and deeply pathological, has become in Micronesia a ritual of adolescence, with its own particular rules and symbols. Virtually all suicides on the islands, in fact, are identical variations on Sima's story. The victim is almost always male. He is in his late teens, unmarried, and living at home. The precipitating event is invariably domestic: a dispute with girlfriends or parents. In three quarters of the cases, the victim had never tried — or even threatened — suicide before. The suicide notes tend to express not depression but a kind of wounded pride and self-pity, a protest against mistreatment. The act itself typically occurs on a weekend night, usually after a bout of drinking with friends. In all but a few cases, the victim observes the same procedure, as if there was a strict, unwritten protocol about the correct way to take one's own life. He finds a remote spot or empty house. He takes a rope and makes a noose, but he does not suspend himself, as in a typical Western hanging. He ties the noose to a low branch or a window or a doorknob and leans forward, so that the weight of his body draws the noose tightly around his neck, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain. Unconsciousness follows. Death results from anoxia — the shortage of blood to the brain.

In Micronesia, the anthropologist Donald Rubinstein writes, these rituals have become embedded in the local culture. As the number of suicides has grown, the idea has fed upon itself, infecting younger and younger boys, and transforming the act itself so that the unthinkable has somehow been rendered thinkable. According to Rubinstein, who has documented the Micronesian epidemic in a series of brilliant papers