Last night in a fit of boredom (and to take my mind of the little brats before bedtime!) I looked at the search volumes in Google for all the different running shoes brands and promised I would not really make any comments on the data. I lied. While you have to take the data for what it is, a couple of things did jump out at me. For example, I was surprised how many searches there were for Vitruvian and Loco running shoes which have not existed for some time now. The similarity between the Hoka One One and Vibram FiveFingers also caught my eye. So its now early in the morning on the day before Christmas and despite their behavior last night I am waiting for the girls to get up and see what we added under the Christmas tree last night. While waiting for them, I used Google Trends to look at the trends in search for the words ‘Hoka One One’ and ‘Vibram FiveFinger’ and embedded the graph below. This is a live graph and is updated daily by Google, so for some more Christmas folly, we can monitor it:
The above script does not seem to load every time in every browser, so here is a screen shot from 24 December. Vibram’s are the red line and Hoka’s the blue line:
POSTSCRIPT: This is what I got on 12 May 2014 (see comments below):
I note there is a very recent upsurge in Vibrams, which may be related to the proposed settlement of the class action announced about 10 days ago.
Thats funny. That is sure to get the fanatics in a tizzy. Those who so firmly attached themselves to minimalism fad should be embarrassed now given what has transpired this year.
minimalist is great, no, i’m not embarrassed, i am not a die hard minimalist i run in what i find comfy (just my socks usually on treadmill!) and am careful how much i push it in minimalist. thats the key to it all really. a bit of patience and knowledge goes a long way and if i want to go on a mad sprint and pound hard then i put on a bit of padding. just common sense really
i don’t see why it has to be one or the other as long as my running form doesn’t suffer
Happy New Year to all
As opposed to shoes with no evidence?
Shoes for heavy people?
I can’t seem to reproduce the trend chat you’ve captured here. In every option I try VFF is vastly more common than hoka.
Daniel – I just checked and pretty much got the same thing. I can’t post a screen shot in this reply, so will add a screen shot as a postscript above.