The European Comfort Shoe Market: Seeking Further Health Functions

This chapter describes and analyzes the emergence of the European shoe market in Japan as one of the consequences of JIF’s success. Comfort shoes imported from Europe were foreign to the Japanese shoe market and did not sell well at first. Although these shoes were good for foot health, they were unfashionable and expensive. However, demand for European health shoes began in the mid-1980s and the European comfort shoe market began to expand in the mid-1990s. Why and how did the European comfort shoe market emerge and expand? The market emerged as an indirect effect of JIF’s initiatives and its unintended consequence; however, while its emergence was unintended, the market still strictly pursued JIF’s superordinate goal of foot health.