Mario Moretti Polegato is an unlikely fashion entrepreneur. As a young man working in his family’s Italian wine business, he never expected to head a global shoe and clothing empire that sells products in 68 countries. He didn’t anticipate that his efforts to patent his products in China would be studied around the world. Or that his fame would bring invitations to speak at English-speaking universities, including Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus. Or that he would end up on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s billionaires. It all happened by accident.

Polegato, founder and chairman of Geox, is the inventor of breathable shoes. In a recent interview with the Georgia Straight in the lobby of the Pan Pacific Vancouver Hotel, Polegato explained how it began. He was in Nevada in the early 1990s promoting Villa Sandi wines. The company has been in the family for three generations, and produces 22 million bottles a year. Polegato said that after meeting American clients he decided to walk in the desert, using rubber-bottom sneakers. The heat was so intense and his feet were sweating so badly that he decided to cut holes on the right and left sides of the soles.

“When I came back to Italy, I take with me this perforated sole,” he said in his lilting Italian accent.

Then he went to work on improving the idea. He created a membrane with tiny canals, which would allow water vapour to enter and leave but were too small to allow water droplets to pass through. The membrane was laid inside the shoe with tiny holes, resting between the foot and the rubber sole. Air comes in through the soles, providing air conditioning for the feet and reducing perspiration.

“It’s breathable and waterproof at the same time,” he noted. “I created [for] the first time in the world a breathable rubber-bottom sole.”

According to Geox’s vice president for Canada, Gino Stinziani, the feet emit seven or eight millilitres of sweat per hour during casual walking. Stinziani, who accompanied Polegato on his trip to Vancouver, told the Straight that the volume of sweat increases to 30 millilitres per hour while running. “Because the bottom of the foot has one of the highest concentration of sweat glands on the body right now, when you wear a rubber sole, it’s the equivalent of wearing a plastic bag because the sweat just accumulates at the bottom of the shoe,” Stinziani said.

Polegato said that he tried to interest major shoe companies in his invention because he had no interest in making shoes. None of the big manufacturers were interested. So in 1995, he started his company with five employees. The name Geox was chosen for two reasons: the word geo represented the earth; the x indicated that the company uses technology. In 13 years, Geox has grown to 30,000 employees and, in 2007, it sold more than 21 million pairs of shoes. He said with a smile that, thanks to Geox, the “smelly feet era” is over.

“We discovered that 90 percent of the population uses a rubber-
bottomed sole,” Polegato noted. “Only 10 percent of the population prefers a leather sole.”

Geox has its own stores in Pacific Centre, on Robson Street, and at Metrotown, and its casual shoes are sold in other shoe stores that carry a variety of brands. The company also produced breathable clothes, which carry the same technology near the shoulders. During his interview with the Straight, Polegato wore a suit with a breathable portion running across the top of the shoulders.

A pair of Geox running shoes sat on the table during the interview. Stinziani said they sell for about $150. The company will soon launch a line of breathable golf shoes.

In a new book called Rogue Economics: Capitalism’s New Reality (Seven Stories Press, $27.50), U.K.–based economist Loretta Napoleoni has suggested that global brands, including Italian products, will face a counterfeiting onslaught in China because of the lack of proper legal controls in that country. She notes that famous brands thrive by creating artificial scarcities, which drive up prices, but these scarcities are shattered when the world is bombarded with fakes. “Counterfeit products and the landscape that surrounds them, from the huge wholesale markets of Southern China to the dollar stores of America, have become the aesthetics of rogue economics, equally celebrated in China and the West,” Napoleoni writes.

Polegato, however, said that Geox has obtained patents in China, which has given his brand legal protection in that country. It took six years, he noted, but the patents are registered in an office in Beijing. Polegato added that international-trade laws apply to China now that it has been admitted into the World Trade Organization. “In fact, Geox is a case history,” he said. “A lot of entrepreneurs’ confederations and universities want to study the Geox experience.”

It appears that a lot of investors are also studying Geox, judging by the wealth that Polegato has accumulated in a relatively short period of time.