A couple a months ago Brooks announced that they would discontinued their shoe "Launch" and "The Green Silence" (GS), to make more room for the some what new PURE PROJECT.....Brooks fans all over the world kind of went crazy. Brooks made sure that the new PURE shoes would fill the gap after the shoes but the fans was not happy and the protests continues. A few months later Brooks posted a blog announcing that they would keep "Launch"and made a 180 degree turn over, "Green Silence" are still to be discontinued.
Now it seems like Mizuno is going the same route. Mizuno has already announced that they will discontinue Nexus but the rumors says that one of the best looking shoes out there Elixir is meeting the same destiny. Mizuno has also announced the new Sayonara to replace Precision. Mizuno might reconsider this as Precision won some rewards and got a lot of publicity.
Over the years Adidas has also been know for killing lot of shoes according to some of my Adidas die hard fans over in Europe.
Is it right to discontinue shoes for what ever the reason it is? Will runners stay with the company and try the new model or move on to another brand. Lot of tricky question to be answered. Let say if you have been running in the Mizuno Precision for 13 years (Precision 13 is out now) Would you automatically move on to Sayonara? And is Elixir selling that bad, Elixir has a lot of hard core fans out there? By replacing these model, do they really think that the new shoe will sell so much better? I can see what Brooks did try to achieve. They wanted to give the new PURE line a booze and were hoping to get Launch and GS users over, but Mizuno is just replacing one shoe with another, no big changes. The Sayonara could have been a Precision 14. Hopefully Mizunos runners will stay with the replacements, but again wouldn't it have been better to just keep Elixir and Precision?
Brooks did the right thing by keeping the Launch for sure and perhaps the GS users will find a good replacement in the PURE PROJECT, like Flow or Cadence. Hopefully the Mizuno runner will do the same. But the shoe companies are really gambling with its customers and runners according to me. Some bad publicity at different forums changed Brooks mind, I wonder if Mizuno will do the same?
Thanks for sharing that. It's not like I have never heard of this company doing this before. It’s no wonder why runners are jumping ship. Where I live people tend to quickly share news about companies that engage in business practices of the type you mention. Generally, people pay more for and other fashionable items if they know that the company ascribes to the same values they do.
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