Brand Story: HOKA

I’ll start with a personal anecdote.

It must have been around 2011 or 2012: the height of my readership of Athletics Weekly, which, at the time, was definitively the best source of info, stats and insight into the world of Track and Field, Cross Country, and Road Running.

As a subscriber, I’d get the newest issue through the door every Thursday, passing the copy around the family with each of us taking turns reading what latest was in there and finding our names in the results pages. This one day, there was a collection of shoe reviews on some of the latest trainers; Nike had done some stuff with interesting midsoles, Asics and Mizuno tried to out-do each other with Wave-plates and Gel tech, but for the most part shoes were all pretty similar daily models with different branding.

But this time as I looked, there on the page was what I thought was a moon boot. I showed it to my Dad (a decades-long runner) and we both vowed that we’d never run in something so ridiculous in our lives, and that these things would never stick around, let alone enter the mainstream.

I read on as the tech editor at the time explained briefly how this little-known French outfit began as in the mountains by two trail and ultra runners who had a fair share of experience with battered legs and DNFs from the pounding Alpine terrain that was their home, and host to many of their favoured racing. It was not, it turns out, the gruelling burn of the ascents that were causing so many ultra-trail athletes issues, but the bombing downhills and the sustained impact of descending for miles on end.

As former employees of major shoe labels like Salomon, the two founders, Jean-Luc Diard and Nicolas Mermoud decided that looking at shoes in the conventional sense was not going to cut it. Incidentally, on the other side of the mountains, in Zurich, three Swiss runners were also gleefully cutting up the rulebook of trainer-making, but that’s a story for another day.

En vogue at the time was the minimalist and barefoot movement which espoused the idea that to remove risk of injury was a case of returning the foot to its natural ways of motion through cutting out cushioning and getting strong. Diard and Mermoud’s response was to do the exact opposite, asking the question: What if we added MORE cushioning?

Over time, they prototyped shoes and foams that allowed maximum cush alongside the inherent stability of wider-last shoes, adding in a rocker system to propel runners forward through the chunky hulk of foam. As they aimed to do, the French duo finally put it all together to create a shoe that would allow runners to fly by sustaining their effort over gruelling distances.

In case you haven’t worked it out (or read the title of this piece), the brand that I was seeing emblazoned on the side of these “moon shoes” in my magazine was Hoka – or more specifically, Hoka One One (pronounced Hoka Onay Onay), the name of the brand at the time. Curiously and perhaps a little questionably for a French brand with little to no connection to pre-colonial Polynesia, the brand took its name from the Māori language, meaning “to fly over the earth”. Since, they have dropped the One One, leaving us only slightly less unsure of the true pronunciation of the brand.

These chunky trainers were quickly embraced by the quirky world of ultra-running, which was largely a niche pursuit beyond a couple of pockets of communities in mountain towns of Europe and the USA, but soon the triathletes took notice and the trickle-down effect to the stubborn road-running stalwarts was all but inevitable. Maybe they were on to something. I started noticing them more and more around 2013 as they were acquired by conglomerate giant Deckers Brands, their lineup also starring the likes of UGG and Teva. 

Pro-athlete deals, race wins, Olympians all followed, along with a huge uptake from career professionals who spend lots of time on feet in hospitals, on sales floors and hairdressing salons around the world. The rest, they say, is history.

But what HOKA really have is more than just creating a wacky product. For a brand that is still less than 20 years old (they were founded in 2009), their significance to running shoe culture has been exponentially larger than their age suggests. Since their birth, we have seen stack-heights explode into categories that would send a barefoot purist into a state of incurable shock. They pushed other brands to massively reconsider what they were doing at the time and challenging major players to meet a new standard. Observationally, it seems to me that the natural next step for many brands was not simply to increase how much cushioning sits under foot, but to invest into the quality of that foam. Perhaps without HOKA, we wouldn’t have the super-shoes that are seeing people shatter barriers that were previously considered impossible, but I’m speculating.

For us, the HOKA classics are where the magic truly lies: the Bondi and Clifton range have always been firm favourites in our daily-trainer offering. The stability of the Gaviota 6 has been popular for our gait analysis customers, whilst the Cielo x1 3.0 gives a new spin on the racing shoe for those looking for serious speed.

For those wondering if my father or myself ever did end up trying HOKAs, then the answer is very much yes, with Dad eating his own words by admitting the Speedgoat 4 GTX is potentially the best shoe he’s ever worn. Here’s to that! Time to Fly. 

SHOP HOKA HERE