Keep Running: A Company in Search of the Finish Line

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To explain how he and Lee could contemplate building a shoe on their own, Abshire likes to talk about the carpet in his new office. If he wanted to get a custom-made welcome mat with the red-and-yellow Newton logo woven into the fibers, all he would have to do is e-mail an image of the logo to a factory in North Carolina. A carpet could be sewn, shipped to Boulder, and installed by the front door of the Newton offices in as little as three days.

"Could you do that 10 years ago?" Abshire asks. "Could you do that even five years ago? Three years ago?"

After making a few calls and poking around the Internet, Abshire found a consultant in Portland, Oregon, who used to work for Adidas, and who was able to link up Abshire, Russell, and Lee with freelance shoe designers. The first design realized, the Bri-tek, was blue and clunky, with an exaggerated heel and forefoot and only blank space beneath the wearer's arch. The trio put up a website, featuring a link where people could order the shoe. That website can still be found online. There's the blue shoe spinning and an endorsement from Paula Newby-Fraser, a triathlete. There's discussion of the technology, of energy returns and motion. But Bri-tek had no marketing to speak of, and so few people showed interest in the product that the shoe died stillborn. Anyone who placed an advance order received a refund.

"I had to ask myself, Do I stop now, or do I go a little further in?" Lee recalls. "That decision was probably made about 24 times in the past 12 years. It was always a business decision, but emotion started getting into it. I was looking at the technology and saying, 'This is good; this works. Why are we the only ones that can see it?' "

Lee and Abshire decided to continue, but only after jettisoning Russell. They bought out the inventor and killed the Bri-tek name. Russell kept his patents, and he anticipated licensing fees when the new shoes, whatever they were called, went into production. But Lee eventually persuaded Russell to sell the patents, too, claiming it was the only way the company could go forward profitably. In exchange for his patents, Russell was given a five-year consultant's contract, and his name remains on the Who We Are page of the Newton website.

"In a sense I was squeezed out," Russell told me when I visited him at his home. "It's not quite as friendly as it sounds."

After dropping Russell, Abshire completely redesigned the shoes, by himself. The five rubber lugs in the forefoot, one for each metatarsal, were pared down to four. A springy disk in the heel was sliced off and replaced by narrow, flat foam that made the heel look like the heel on most running shoes -- a cosmetic choice. Abshire managed to further liposuction 7 ounces from the Gravity model trainers, leaving each shoe at around 10 ounces, very light. Once the prototypes were refined and the blueprints digitized, the consultant in Portland hooked up Abshire and Lee with a factory in China where the shoes could be built.

The Newton name came from TDA, a local branding shop that has worked with the Denver Nuggets basketball team and Celestial Seasonings, the tea company also based in Boulder. The first prototypes Abshire and Lee brought around still had thick layers of glue, recalls Thomas Dooley, TDA's founder and co-creative director.

"I must have gone through a thousand names until I came to Newton," Dooley says. "We wanted something simple and basic, a fundamental law of physics that's easily understandable: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

The name implies motion, which resonates with runners. It also implies science, people in lab coats testing and retesting. Dooley's shop unified the branding, designing not only the website but also the company logo and the shoe boxes and even helping style the shoes themselves. Everything looks professional. It's hard to believe Newton is basically a mom-and-pop start-up with only a handful of employees.

"That was something we very much did on purpose," Lee tells me. "We realized we only have one chance to make a first impression. We wanted to look like we were serious players from the very beginning."

The marketing of the shoes is effective, as I can attest. Whether the shoes are as good as advertised is a tricky question.

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