Osaga KT-26 REVOLUTION vintage sneaker ad from 1979. The Osaga KT-26 is a cult classic sneaker only known to a few and are now rare collector items that sell used for upwards of $300-$1000 a pair. This original vintage magazine ad is available over at our Rewind Running web shop.
We were able to piece together a brand profile from "TonyK" on the Letsrun.com forum board who posted an excellent detailed account of Osaga’s history way back in 2009. Tony’s write up:
I somehow landed on your sight today and saw your comments about OSAGA. I was one of the first people to market OSAGA in the United States and was there from day one. Most of the comments and responses you received are a bit off target. The company was started about three months after a small company by the name of "Blue Ribbon Sports" or, as the name you may know better as "NIKE". It was started by a family shoe store retailer by the name of Bill Combs in Eugene, Oregon. Although he has passed, his stores are still there and are called "Burchs Fine Shoes". we were around Bill Bowerman several times because he was a good friend of Bill Combs. We would all go to dinner during big meets such as NCAA Cross Country championships, etc.
Almost all of the shoes had names beginning with the letter "C" as research found that those words were the easiest to remember. Names like Capra (which is the brightly colored shoes your responders are talking about), Cortina, Columbia and Cochise, which was meant to compete with the Adidas Country and was green and white as well.
The logo colors where Green and Yellow, but not because of Oregon. Once again, marketing research said those were the most pleasing colors. Osaga was the first company to put emphasis on matching warm-ups, bags, hats, shirts, etc to the shoe colors.
The original idea of the company was that the shoes would be world class running and athletic shoes but not be sold in sporting goods stores and would be made available only to family shoe stores. As you might guess this took away the opportunity to have athletes as spokespersons. Alberto Salazar is the only "major" runner to have worn the shoes and that only happed for a very short time.
Your responders are right that the technology morphed into Avia. OSAGA developed a shoe called the KT-26 which was rated the #2 running shoe in the world as rated by Runner's World magazine. Although the shoes could then be found in some Athletes Foot stores, there was no base of well known runners in sponsored by OSAGA to really maximize the potential for expansion. At that time Bill Combs was running out of money and the writing was on the wall. The company was closed and the technology of the KT-26 Cantilever sole was sold to Avia for a small amount of money.
Oddly enough, the best shoe OSAGA Ever produced was called the OSAGA 2000 which,at the time, was the lightest weight tennis shoe ever produced. It used lightweight materials that are common place today but were evolutionary at that time.
OSAGA was named after the Osage Native American Indians from Oklahoma and the tag line was "For the Human Race".
This other small excerpt on Osaga is from the book Out of Nowhere: The Inside Story of how Nike Marketed the Culture of Running by Geoff Hollister:
In three days, my staff member Peter Thompson and I were flying to Madison, Wisconsin for NCAA cross country. We immediately ran into Burch's Bill Combs of Eugene who decided if Phil Knight can do it, he could too. Burch's was the top shoe store in Eugene, and Combs started his own brand, naming it Osaga. He put money into Dellinger's scoreboard at Hayward Field, which we had turned down. Bowerman was irate at his successor's decision. Now Combs was at the NCAA meet, sponsoring a breakfast for athletes in an attempt to draw attention to his poorly built training flats.
Ouch.
