BY ETHAN SEMLER
STAFF WRITER
Remember those shoes that had wheels in them from awhile back? What were they called again? Wheelys? Wheel shoes? Zoomers? The answer is heelys!
Like I said earlier, Heelys are shoes that have wheels built into the heel of the shoe. The man behind it all, Roger Adams, came up with the idea as a result of a mid life crisis. Roger Adams was always enthusiastic about skating. He was roller skating at the young age of 9 months old!
When asked about how the idea for heelys came about, Roger Adams had this to say:
“I was a mental-health supervisor in Oregon, and I hated it with a passion. I enjoyed working with people one-on-one, but when I moved into management to make more money, it was a miserable time… I was going through a divorce after a 21-year marriage. I was on call 24 hours a day, and I was totally burned out”
He was drained. He was constantly working, going through a divorce, and he just wasn’t happy with where he was at in life at the time. One day he saw some kids skating near his house, and he said that it reminded him of a happier time in his life.
That’s where he got the idea for a “shoe that could roll on command by just shifting your body weight” as Roger described it.
To make his first prototype, Roger Adams took an old pair of Nike tennis shoes, cut the heel out with a hot butter knife, and put a rod through them with a rod bearing from a skateboard. Of course that prototype was changed many times before it became the shoe we see in stores today.
It may have all started with a cut open old Nike shoe, but the company has come a long way. They quickly became a household name. In 2003, they sold over 1.25 million pairs of shoes. Although not as popular almost two decades after the start of the company, they’re still going strong. Recently, they’ve had collabs with Nickelodeon, Marvel, Jojo Siwa, MTV, and Reebok.
Although harder to find in actual stores nowadays, online stores such as amazon, ebay, zappos, Journeys, and the official Heely’s website still sell them today.
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