Brand shout-outs in hip-hop songs are nothing new -- but most focus on luxury names. Kanye West tells of a cutie with a "baby Louis Vuitton under her arm" in "Gold Digger," Missy Elliott raps about a Cadillac Escalade in "Lick Shots" and anyone who has heard Busta Rhymes' "Pass the Courvoisier" knows his Cognac of choice.
Few songs, though, make a product or company their main focus. There was Run-DMC's "My Adidas" in 1986. And now there is "Vans," a song by Bay Area rappers the Pack that hit mainstream radio in California a couple of months ago and is shaking up the great footwear divide between the hip-hop and rock camps.
While the song has been climbing charts and driving traffic to the group's MySpace.com page, it also has been spurring fans to plunk down $37 for a pair of Vans, the shoes that until now have been embraced mainly by skaters, surfers and punk rockers.
"It's like the song was egging me on" to buy a pair, says 21-year-old Kyle Troupe, who says that until hearing "Vans" he'd never even been in the Vans store near his Santa Monica home. Last weekend, though, he found himself purchasing pairs No. 4 and No. 5.
"The beat is so crazy," says Troupe, who will be a senior at Howard University this fall. The song has a hypnotic beat as it repeats, "Got my Vans on, but they look like sneakers," over and over again throughout.
Whether plugs from hip-hop songs translate into higher sales is difficult to measure, says Lucian James, president of Agenda Inc., a research and strategy company based in San Francisco and Paris. Some Vans retailers, though, say that's an easy call. Business has definitely improved, they say, since "Vans" hit the airwaves, and it's bringing in a new kind of consumer for the skate shoe.
At the 510 Skateboarding store on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, sales are twice as high as they were this time last year, says owner Jerry Harris, who is seeing a change in demographics among Vans buyers.
"I have definitely seen more of an urban customer coming in for Vans," Harris says. "Previously, it was more of just skateboard kids. [Now] they're more of a hip-hop kind of a crowd."
The shoes have become so popular, he says, that some sizes are selling out -- including those of the band members, who shop there. "They come in looking for shoes in their size and we don't have them," Harris says, laughing. "We tell them it's their fault."
