Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a Squiz podcast. We're your shortcut to being informed. This podcast is brought to you by BHP. BHP plays a big role in the Australian economy, from the tax it pays, the small, local and Indigenous businesses it backs, regional communities it supports and how it contributes to the broader economy. Ugg boots are an Australian invention loved by millions of people around the world.
But while the concept is ours, the right to use the Ugg name has been the subject of a long international legal fight. Earlier this month, the Aussie credited with launching the boots commercially, Shane Stedman, died. And that got us thinking about a bit of a different Squeeze Shortcut, where we look at the origins of the Ugg boot, Stedman's legacy and the fight over the Ugg name.
Squeeze Shortcuts is the backstory to the big news stories. I'm Alice Dempster.
And I'm Andrew Williams.
Andrew, this one's a bit out of left field, but it was sparked by an email that we got from a squizzer, Steve. Thanks, Steve. After we said that we were digging out our UGG boots because it's been getting colder.
Yeah, so off the back of that, Steve wanted to let us know that his friend, Shane Stedman, the first Australian to make and sell the boots commercially in modern times, had died on the 1st of May. By all accounts, Stedman was an all-around great bloke who led a full life centred around his passion for surfing and making surfboards.
And not many people might know this, but surfing and surf culture played a big part in the early development of the UGG, and it's how Stedman first came across the idea.
So legend has it he first saw a kind of makeshift version of the boots in the 1970s when he was visiting surfboard customers in Victoria. One of them had his feet wrapped in sheepskin to keep them warm, and it was held together loosely with masking tape and resin. And when Stedman asked him what they were called, the reply was UGG boots.
Ugg boots, although at the time, for some reason, it was spelt U-G-H amongst the people that wore them, but it was still pronounced Ugg. So even then, Uggs were a thing, but they weren't widely known about. So Stedman saw an opportunity there. He asked his friend if he could start making them, and thus it began.
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Chapter 2: What are the origins of UGG boots?
Yeah, there are records of shepherds in the 1800s wrapping sheepskin around their feet and ankles tied with leather straps to keep warm. By the 1920s, they'd become proper boots and they were common among shearers in rural Australia. There was good reason for that.
There was. It's because the sheepskin can cope with the lanolin from sheep's wool, which was known to ruin ordinary leather boots. So they were basically workwear. There's another chapter in this as well. During World War I, Australian and British pilots were also said to have used sheepskin boots because cockpits weren't pressurised temperatures could get freezing cold.
So some reckon those pilots called them flying Uggs, short for ugly, and that's where the name comes from.
And by then they were moving beyond just practical use.
Chapter 3: Who was Shane Stedman and what was his impact on UGG boots?
The first known producer was Blue Mountains Ugg Boots in New South Wales. They started selling them on a small scale to tourists in the 1930s.
And then in the late 1950s, a man named Frank Mortell began making them through Mortell's Sheepskin Factory and claimed that he was the first to call them Ugg Boots. after his wife looked at an early pair and said that they were ugly. So as you can see, there's a bit of overlap in who sold them first and where the term comes from.
Although the fact that it links to the idea of them being ugly seems to be a consistent thing that goes through all of this.
Yeah. And I mean, it's not that hard to make that leap. They've always been thought of more for comfort than high fashion. But Even though they'd been around for decades, they weren't really a national thing until they started being picked up by surfers in the 1960s and 70s. That's where Stedman comes in.
Yeah, he was the first person to kind of see the larger commercial opportunity here and he trademarked them as... UGH UGG boots in the 1970s and started making them for surfers who took to them in droves because they were the perfect thing to pull on after an early morning surf to keep warm. An early morning surf can be a very cold experience, particularly once you're out of the water.
Yep. They quickly became part of the surfing lifestyle. And then enter another surfer, Brian Smith. He saw the demand for the boots and he decided to take a suitcase of them over to California in the late 70s.
That was a good idea on his part. They sold very quickly and his next move was to set up a business called UGG Holdings. And this is a big turning point in the story because Smith and his business partner registered UGG as a trademark in the US and then worked to build it up. So by the mid-1980s, he'd also registered the name Original UGG Boot UGG Australia.
Now that might sound like a lot of words, but this all plays into the importance of the trademark.
Yeah. Then in 1995, Smith bought Stedman's trademark UGG, the UGH original trademark too. So that meant he owned both the US and Australian rights to the name.
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Chapter 4: How did surfing culture influence the popularity of UGG boots?
Yeah, and that kicked off years of legal fights. Local companies banded together and argued that the word had been used generically here for generations. And the matter came to a head in 2006 when a Perth company called Uggs and Rugs won the right to use the term in Australia. The judge said that the evidence overwhelmingly showed Ugg
UGG and UGG, all spellings of it, the UGH version, the UG version, were all common descriptions for that style of boot in this country.
And that was a big win, but only in Australia. Deckers still owns the UGG trademark in most countries, including huge markets like the US, Europe, and most of Asia. And that means that Australian makers can call them UGG boots here, but if they want to sell them overseas, they mostly need a different name.
And that's still causing drama to this day. So the Australian company UGG since 1974 recently announced that it would have to ditch the UGG part of its branding. So it'll just go by since 1974 or since 74 for international sales due to ongoing legal pressure from Deckers, that US company.
And in general, UGGs are still huge. They're extremely popular among Gen Zs. Deckers has reported consistently strong sales of them. And to put a number to it, last year alone, the company netted sales of more than $2.5 billion US dollars globally, which is around $3.8 billion Australian dollars.
That's pretty remarkable for something that started as a piece of sheepskin tied to a shepherd's feet. But to loop back to the beginning of this story, the legacy belongs to Shane Stedman as well. He didn't invent the Ugg boot, but he recognised that as a concept, they had a lot of commercial potential.
But even though they did go on to become an Australian fashion icon, he himself never made squillions of dollars out of them.
No, according to his son, he was happier having surfing and surfboard making as his main game, but he did apparently negotiate a very handy clause when he sold his rights, free pairs of Uggs every year.
Yep, that's not a bad bonus and well-deserved for giving the world the concept of the Ugg boot, which culturally Australians certainly will always say, that's one of ours, that's our thing, that's like a Lamington.
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