A tribute to Eastbay & their catalogues.

The place our generation fell in love with sneakers and learnt to dream

“I’m going to do an Eastbay order, do you want to split the shipping?” - this was both my favourite thing to say and also my favourite thing to hear from circa 1997 - 2010.

Eastbay, for those who don’t know, was (in my mind) the world’s first online athletic shoes & apparel store that shipped to Australia. The shipping wasn’t as extortionary as you think it could have been - I can’t remember the details but I feel there was some kind of flat rate where once you ordered over a certain amount, the price didn’t go up, hence splitting the cost with a friend or two. 

Originally founded in the 80s as a running shoe wholesaler, they built their business in the early 90s by becoming a direct-mail order company. When the World Wide Web became a thing, it pivoted again, shifting its focus to the internet and expanding its product range to help them reach a wider audience.

They designed product-heavy monthly catalogues that were sent out with every order and you could also join the monthly subscription to receive these bad boys in the mail. Before I was old enough to have a job and buy what I wanted, these catalogues were the equivalent of finding nudes of peak Baywatch Pammy. They were a place where my imagination would run wild. “I want to pair these shoes with these shorts and this t-shirt.” I collected these things like they were basketball cards, with the thin catalogue pages being as close as I would ever get to the real product.

Look at these beauties…

Eastbay was printing monthly catalogues that I find more impressive than the Mona Lisa. Cover-to-cover jam-packed like the Glenferrie Rd 3:21 pm tram (my Melburnians will get this one).

Eastbay became everybody's (in Australia at least) favourite place to shop. It felt like they were your mates with their amazing customer service and you knew they weren’t taking you for a ride with their competitive prices. Whilst my memory tells me I was paying half-price for the sneakers I wanted, I have a hard time believing it. Maybe it wasn’t 50% cheaper but I do know that the discount was so good, it was worth saving up to do a quarterly or bi-yearly order. It was also a place to learn about American culture. The countless pages of track and field equipment, baseball gloves and football helmets were always cool to think, ‘not sure what this is but I could probably use it’. 

What made Eastbay so appealing to lil’ Aussie battlers like me, was the extensive product range. Australia would get very limited basketball shoes, which resulted in a lot of Asics-type runners being worn on the hardwood. Looking back, I think this is where I started to judge people about their talents based upon their shoes. If I was playing against somebody in runners, I was going to be having a nice game. Not only could you get your grubby little mitts (hands) on a whole heap of different product styles on Eastbay but you could get colourways that weren’t just the standard black and white. So there was no reason for your shoes not to match your team’s uniform.

Look at the countless colours below.

(Side note, I fucking loved the Nike Air Futuristic.. I never got to own them or even see them IRL but they had a bit going on, which I really liked.)

Looking at the above.. how the hell can you have the Nike Shoe VC Mid - made famous by Vince Carter (obviously) - on the same page as the Nike Levitate Low & Air Down Low?  These are completely different design languages but Eastbay had that much product (both good & bad), I doubt they really cared about what worked on a page and what didn’t.

Eastbay was influential in my desire to be different, let’s say. I hated somebody in the league, let alone a teammate having the same shoes as me. This was something I had to eventually let go of, once the internet became more of a thing and the big players like Footlocker & Nike started to get their shit together for us Down Under. This hatred took me to the point where I actually wore the Fila Grant Hills (pictured below) for at least a full season, or until my foot grew out of them. I vividly remember, in primary school thinking I was the man, wearing knee-high Champion socks and Fila shoes, Grant Hill 2s, to be exact - nice parenting, for letting that happen, Mum :) (who is obviously also a subscriber).

I also wore these in 2001 thanks to Eastbay.

I’ve only learnt in my later years that Eastbay was a global movement, which shows how sheltered my little world was growing up. Back in the day, I thought it was just for the 20 people I knew, that knew about it. Eastbay raised a generation of kids who truly cared about what they looked like on and off the court. To quote Chris Webber “It was the internet before the internet”. The countless hours we used to spend going through the monthly magazine and circling products (that we were never going to buy) have since been replaced by endless scrolling and losing sneaker raffles to bots.

Here is to a simpler time.
Here is to whoever named the Nike products.
Here is to the 1800 numbers I could never call.
Here is to the one and only, Eastbay.

How good is the silhouette of the Air Double Face. All white Jordan 5’s for $89..you are essentially printing money at that rate.

I also loved the Jumpman and Team Nike collections. They made some trash but also a lot of seriously nice sneakers.

Thanks for turning back the clock with me.

Thanks to Brenton who requested a District 5ive style tribute to Eastbay. Feel free to do the same if you want me to deep dive on something.

All images are from: Eastbay.Archive