Friday, October 15, 2004, Boston Red Sox fans opened their morning paper to more bad news. Winless in the first two games of the American League Championship Series, the franchise now announced that the injured right ankle of pitcher Curt Schilling was too sore for the 21-game winner to start again. "Barring a last-minute breakthrough," the Boston Globe reported, "Curt Schilling may have thrown his last pitch in trying to help the Red Sox end their 86-year championship famine."

Enter the global supply chain.

For almost a decade, Schilling had worn Reebok cleats. As his injury worsened, the $3.5-billion sneaker firm had worked on a fix with the Red Sox medical staff. Now the order for another shoe traveled from the east coast to the Far East. "I was in Hong Kong when I got a phone call that he wanted a more substantial shoe," Don Gibadlo, the director of promotional footwear for Reebok, told the New York Times. "I got our people in China working on a hightop shoe to give him more support."

What followed exemplified each of the shoe industry's three seismic shifts. The first and most well-known move saw assembly lines migrate from century-old hubs in New England to the new free market zones of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the fifteen years from 1968 to 1983, the percentage of American-made shoes sold in this country fell from 95 to 50 percent. The focus of home offices like Reebok's Canton, Massachusetts headquarters changed accordingly, from manufacturing and distribution to design and marketing.

In the 1990s, the value chain stretched again to reach less expensive labor in China, Thailand, and Vietnam. As American-made shoes sank to fewer than 2 percent of the domestic market, third-party experts in Taiwan and Hong Kong took over core research and development as well as direct management and even design for industry leaders like Nike, Reebok, Converse, and Adidas. Such "radical outsourcing practices" could render American athletic shoe corporations mere "quality certification" specialists predicted professors Robert Laubacher and Thomas Malone of MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Yet this analysis neglected the thorny logistics necessary to keep up with today's ever-changing sneaker chic. Complex products like the Reebok cleat, which require as many as 150 distinct manufacturing operations, are first and foremost fashion items. In that context, the speed of the global supply chain is as important as its economy.

"There is tremendous market pressure to produce ever more sophisticated, sleek footwear designs within shorter design cycles," observes industry consultancy think3 in a white paper on the rise of manufacturable 3-D models. Within seconds, the report quotes an Adidas designer in Oregon, he can show Asian manufacturers "exactly what we want to see as a return part" rather than wait half a year for "interpretations of the 2-D blueprints we originally sent."

Schilling's 'magic shoe', as television commentators called it, exemplified the supply chain operating at warp speed. Yet in the efficiency of design and speed of execution, it was the rule rather than the exception.

Starting the crucial sixth game in his new shoe, the ace allowed four hits and one run in seven innings for the victory. A week later, for the first time since 1918, the Red Sox were World Champions. Since the best efforts of just-in-time logistics had helped reverse the sporting world's most famous curse, perhaps there should also be be rings for the international 3PL team!

"It's good for Curt, good for the team, and good for Reebok," director Don Gibadlo answered. "In that order."