Design Museum Magazine: The Footwear Issue - Summer 2022 - Issue 022 by Design Museum Everywhere

The Footwear Issue

Magazine

S.E.E.D. Soles Breaking Barriers, Planting Seeds, & Charting Pathways Page 30

Summer 2022 Issue 022 US $20

Interview with Chris Dixon Page 44

0 704521 511983

MISE Reinventing Footwear for the Culinary Industry

How to Build a Future-Ready Product Archive

Page 50

Page 68

“

I’ve not seen a collection like this before—the timeline on the history of prosthetics alone is an amazing resource for the field. In addition both the design and personal stories are astounding!” — Wilson W. Smith III, Senior Designer, Nike, Professor of Adaptive Design, U. of Oregon

Order online: dme.link/bespokebodiesbook

Magazine STAFF

MISSION

Sam Aquillano, Executive and Creative Director

Bring the transformative power of design everywhere.

Claire-Solène Bečka, Executive Associate & Copy Editor Marie Coste, Grants and Membership Manager Jocelyn Rice, Director of Thought Leadership J.R. Uretsky, Exhibitions Manager Maria Villafranca, Deputy Director

We educate people to become creative problem solvers using design thinking & process. We transform, using design to take action and make change, demonstrating its impact.

IMPACT AREAS

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Austen Angell Gregory Bombard Dana Chisnell Tom Di Lillo Ashley Dunn Jessica Ekong Eric Corey Freed Josephine Holmboe Elizabeth Lowrey Gaby Mier

We inspire people by showing what’s possible through public exhibitions, events, & content.

Leila Mitchell Larry Rodgers Alan Scott Roxane Spears Scott Stropkay Tracy Swyst George White Amy Winterowd John Wix

Business Civic Innovation Data Visualization

Community Education Entrepreneurship Healthcare Play Social Impact

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Learn more: designmuseumeverywhere.org

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Contents. DEPARTMENTS 4

Contributors

10 Q&A

From the Editor

24 Community Series

Recommendations

FEATURES 12

COMMUNITY

Best Foot Forward A Photo Essay of Designers’ Favorite Footwear Projects

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

S.E.E.D. Soles Breaking Barriers, Planting Seeds, & Charting Pathways By Cheresse Thornhill-Goldson, S.E.E.D. Design Director & Jessica Smith, S.E.E.D. Co-Founder

SOCIAL IMPACT

Yesterday’s Influencers By Stephen Opie, Principal, Opie Design

COMMUNITY • SOCIAL IMPACT

Chris Dixon An Interview with Chris Dixon, Footwear Designer, Timberland & Founder and Creative Director, Cnstnt:Dvlpmnt Interviewed by Jocelyn Rice, Director of Thought Leadership, Design Museum Everywhere 2

FRONT COVER ILLUSTRATION BY PENINA GAL, PENINA.NET

Summer 2022 • Issue 022

The Footwear Issue 50

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

MISE Reinventing Footwear for the Culinary Industry By Erik Hernandez, Founder, MISE

BUSINESS

Step by Step Shoe Design and Development By Susan Ryder, Owner, Susan Ryder Design

SOCIAL IMPACT • ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Designing for a Cause One Colorful Step at a Time By Ann Williams, Creative Director Product Design and Project Management, & Dean Schwartz, Co-Director

BUSINESS

How to build a futureready product archive By Erin Narloch, Founder & Consultant, PastForward, Head of Web3, Enwoven

ENTREPENEURSHIP

Endstate Sneakers | Collaborations | Community By Stephanie Howard & Bennett Collen, Co-founders of Endstate

DESIGN MUSEUM MAGAZINE ISSUE 022 SUMMER 2022 (ISSN 2573-9204) IS PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY DESIGN MUSEUM EVERYWHERE, PO BOX #9188 25 NEW CHARDON STREET LOBBY, BOSTON, MA 02114. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO DESIGN MUSEUM EVERYWHERE, PO BOX #9188 25 NEW CHARDON STREET LOBBY, BOSTON, MA 02114.

Contributors. Bennett Collen Bennett is the cofounder/CEO of Endstate. He formerly founded Cognate, which pioneered the use of smart contracts/NFTs to represent trademark rights (acquired by GoDaddy 2018). He is an adjunct Professor teaching Business Applications of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency at Boston College’s MBA program. Chris Dixon Chris Dixon is a Designer Dad originally from Fayetteville, NC with a passion for design, sports, footwear, and mentoring creatives. Chris is a Footwear Designer for Advanced Concepts & Energy at Timberland, Founder and Creative Director of Cnstnt:Dvlpmnt LLC, and a Pensole Alumni (former Special Projects Designer). Penina Gal Penina Gal is a cartoonist, illustrator, painter, and graphic designer. Originally from New York City, they currently live in Providence, RI with their spouse, three cats, and a sleepy dog. Penina won a SPACE Prize in 2014 for best minicomic. Their comics and illustration work have been published in Cicada Magazine, Narratively, Seven Days, Limestone Post, and a variety of comics anthologies. Penina’s paintings have been included in group exhibitions at the New Bedford Art Museum, AS220 Providence, Trade Gallery Providence, and a solo exhibition at S&G Project Gallery. Erik Hernandez Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Erik Hernandez graduated from ASU’s Industrial Design program in 2007. Erik spent 10 years in the footwear industry at K-Swiss, Vans, and adidas before joining his partner’s agency Studio Noyes in 2016 — working with clients including North Face, Hoka, lululemon, and Yeezy. In 2020, he founded MISE — a brand driven to better the lives and shoes of those in the culinary industry launching spring 2022. Stephanie Howard Stephanie is a former design director at Nike and New Balance, innovation director at Seventh Generation, and consultant to Titleist, The North Face, Vans, and Timberland. She was recently featured in books including: Sneaker Law - “Famous Sneaker Designers You Should Know,” and London Design Museum’s Sneakers Unboxed. She serves on the board of directors of Women in Sports Tech, an organization with the mission to drive growth opportunities for women throughout the sports tech landscape. Sascha Mombartz Sascha Mombartz is an artist, designer, and community builder based in New York. Sascha works at the intersection of systems thinking, communication and user experience design to unravel complex relationships and create meaningful interactions and frameworks that help organizations and individuals build belonging, trust and resilience. He previously worked at the New York Times, Google’s Creative Lab and has consulted with startups and nonprofits for the last 10 years. His work can be found at the Office for Visual Affairs and Close Knit. Erin Narloch Erin leverages more than two decades of experience in cultural institutions, museums, and brands as an innovative thought leader when utilizing heritage to the authenticate, inform, and contextualize brand activities, strategies, and future initiatives. In 2019 she founded her own consultancy, PastForward, focusing on brand strategy and knowledge management and in 2022 she joined New York Times tech start-up, Enwoven, to lead their NFT vertical. Stephen Opie Stephen established OpieDesign in 1992, specializing in product design, brand creation, and innovation-based design methodologies. He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, won three Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), has been awarded numerous (12) patents, and his NEOS industrial boot product was featured in the Museum of Modern Art. He and his partner in life and business, Charlotte Heim, have recently created a new company called Sweetmobility focusing on mobility products for the actively aging population.

George Restrepo George is a designer, educator, connector, collaborator, and aspiring author with more than 20 years of experience in visual communications. He is the founder of Rest Design, a small but agile design practice with a focus on branding and spatial design. The other part of his time he’s a partner at Endpaper Studio, an award-winning book and cover design company with a focus on food, arts, pop culture, travel, natural history, and current events. Susan Ryder Susan Ryder is the founder of Susan Ryder Design, an industrial design consultancy specializing in footwear design, development and sourcing. She has nearly 40 years experience creating innovative and industry leading products for large athletic shoe companies such as Nike and Reebok, medical footwear companies, and high fashion start ups, among others. Dean Schwartz Drawing on a background in advertising and retail, Dean is responsible for business development, client relations, marketing, and contracts. Dean also monitors market and industry trends and is actively involved in the footwear design and development process, from product, market, and consumer research and insight to material, color, and prototype specifications. Dean graduated from Colby College and holds a postgraduate degree from Case Western Reserve. Jessica Smith Jessica Smith is a thought leader in Industry Education. She has worked for over a decade as a Higher Education Administrator and Educator at Columbia University, Portland State University, and University California Los Angeles, and as a Global Leader in University Relations and Early Career programs for fortune 100 companies. In 2020 she co-founded S.E.E.D., School for Experiential Education in Design. Jessica also applies her knowledge of organizational transformation and building diverse and inclusive high performing teams as Strategy Director for adidas Basketball. Jessica served on the adidas United Against Racism Coalition and was identified as an adidas’s High Potential Leader. Jessica is currently a Doctoral Candidate at University of Southern California in Organizational Change and Leadership publishing on the topic of Industry Education. Cheresse Thornhill-Goldson Cheresse is a design leader who has been in the footwear industry for 15 years. Her career began in 2007 at Nike Inc. in Beaverton, OR. During her nearly 10 yr career at Nike she designed footwear across the basketball, running, cricket, women’s training, and Jordan Brand categories. In 2016 she relocated back to her hometown of Miami, FL to teach product design at both the college and high school level including her own high school alma mater. Cheresse simultaneously launched No Shoes Creative, design consultancy, advancing brands like Champion and adidas. In January 2020, she moved to Brooklyn, NY to lead the adidas S.E.E.D. (School for Experiential Education in Design) program. As Design Director of adidas S.E.E.D., she is part of the team transforming the footwear industry and cultivating the next generation of diverse design talent. Ann Williams With extensive industry experience in the USA and the UK, Ann possesses an exceptional working knowledge of all facets of footwear and related product, including design, retail, marketing, licensing, and manufacturing. An award winning designer, Ann has a demonstrated ability to manage multiple, major, international projects and staff. Prior to establishing Schwilliamz, Ann served as Director of Design and Product at the Stride Rite Corporation, before which she worked at Reebok International and Clark’s in Somerset, England. Ann graduated with an Honors degree in Fashion Design, specializing in Footwear, from DeMontfort University, Leicester, England.

From the Editor. Iconic, Accessible Footwear Design I’m finally doing it. I’m writing a book. I just finished the first draft of my book about founding Design Museum Everywhere. The writing — my pandemic project — has me reminiscing and reflecting on 13 years of launching and building the museum. From the beginning, we wanted to help people make the connection between the products, spaces, and experiences that we see and use every day, with the designers and design work that brought them to life. We started our exhibition program with subject matter that we knew resonated with everyone: the design of parks, streets, transportation, and footwear. We featured the design lifecycle of a typical sneaker in one of our first exhibitions. We figured everyone wears shoes, but do folks know the design story behind what they put on their feet every day? When we expanded the museum to include both Boston and Portland, it was clear we were basing our distrusted museum in the two footwear design capitals of the world. There’s so much design history and innovation to learn from in these two cities alone, and all over the world shoe design is nothing less than iconic. They’re part of our self-expression, they’re collectible, and, as you’ll read, now they’re even digital. Shoes are such a great subject to uncover and demystify design — they have utility and technology, style and energy. In this issue, you’ll hear from footwear designers about their design process and craft. Footwear design consultants like Susan Ryder and Ann Williams and Dean Schwartz, designer Chris Dixon from

Timberland, and entrepreneur Erik Hernandez share their unique design stories. We’ll look back on the history of various footwear typologies thanks to Stephen Opie, and look to the future with Cheresse Thornhill-Goldson and Jessica Smith at adidas’s program to educate the next generation of footwear designers, and with Stephanie Howard and Bennet Collen and their new venture, Endstate, combining innovative shoes with digital NFTs. So grab your favorite pair and enjoy this issue of Design Museum Magazine!

Sam Aquillano Executive and Creative Director Design Museum Everywhere

PHOTO: IRENE KREDENETS

Recommendations.

Beth Levine Shoes Beth Levine Shoes tells the story of Beth Levine, a footwear designer who introduced mules, stilettos, and fashion boots to the American market. This book displays many of her designs in beautiful, full-color photographs. Paula Rees Principal, Foreseer Finding Bright Productions

Nike: Better is Temporary A landmark publication that charts Nike's transformation from rebellious upstart to global phenomenon. The publisher notes, “This immersive visual survey offers an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes exploration into Nike's ethos-driven design formula, placing industry-defining innovations and globally recognized products alongside previously unpublished designs, prototypes, insider stories, and more. Beginning with ‘Breaking2,’ an introduction detailing Nike's 2017 attempt to facilitate a sub-two-hour marathon, the book lays out in five thematic chapters Nike's focus on performance, brand expression, collaboration, inclusive design, and sustainability.” George Restrepo Founder, Creative Director Rest Design

The Bata Shoe Museum Located in Toronto, Canada, the Bata Shoe Museum (BSM) regularly displays over a thousand shoes and related artifacts, chosen from a collection of over 14,000 objects, in architect Raymond Moriyama’s iconic, awardwinning building. The BSM celebrates the style, development, and function of footwear across four impressive galleries, with displays ranging from Chinese bound-foot shoes and ancient Egyptian sandals to chestnut-crushing clogs and glamorous platforms. https://batashoemuseum.ca/ Dana Chisnell Fellow Technology and Public Purpose Project, Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School

Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin, James Dean and Kimberly Dean The first in the children’s series Pete the Cat, this book tells the story of Pete the Cat and his changing color of sneakers as he walks down the street, stepping in a variety of substances. Listen to the song while you read! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj_ z6zGQVyM Jocelyn Rice Director of Thought Leadership, Design Museum Everywhere

Sustainable Shopping Advice Avoid any and all petroleum by-product clothing, any “ester,” and any and all fleece (the market is over-run). Let’s make re-style of thrift store purchases the hottest thing going! Sheila Craig Architect, Bisbano & Associates

Q&A. What is your favorite footwear memory?

In my Corporate America days, I became in charge of a new group – new to me and new to each other – with an important business objective. As a first assignment, I brought them off-site where they each were to draw a shoe that represented them. The enlightening discussion that followed set a good foundation for a collaborative team.” Karen Spencer Artist

Stephanie Gioia Partner Future Work Design

It was April 1, 2015 in Boston. It was the first day I went running outside that year. The first day of outdoor running after a rough New England winter is glorious to me. For some reason, this run was particularly fulfilling. It had to have been considering that I took off my shoes and snapped a picture of them with my sunglasses perched on top. Rays of sun are shining on the shoes. Whenever I look at this picture, I am re-connected to my love of running and my love of ‘first days’ in Boston.” Noelle O’Brien Manager of Internship Programs, Boston University

When I turned 18 and got my first credit card, my very first purchase was a pair of red high-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars. I wore those into the ground all through my art school days and bought a brand new pair to wear at my wedding, six years later.” Joseph Schwartz Cofounder, DESIGN-ED

When I was around six years old, my mom took me to get my first pair of ballet shoes. They were pink to match my pink tights, and pink leotard, and before classes started, she let me wear them at home as tsinelas. I was a quiet kid with terrible stage fright, but at home, I was a butterfly, a sugar plum fairy, and a WWF wrestler (I have an older brother).” Maria Villafranca Deputy Director Design Museum Everywhere

When I started college, I bought a pair of black, Oxford, ankle boots that completely changed how I walked - more confident, more secure. The shoes changed how I felt as a person.” Jennifer Rittner Visiting Assistant Professor School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design

Best Shoe Forward A Photo Essay of Designers’ Favorite Footwear Projects We gathered a collection of footwear designers’ favorite projects, showcasing the range of possible styles, functions, and project memories. Read the stories behind these incredible—and even famous—shoes directly from the designers themselves! IMAGE COURTESY OF CHERESSE THORNHILL-GOLDSON

IMAGE COURTESY OF ARIC ARMON

Aric Armon

Footwear Designer Adidas Freak Ultra Laceless We began the design process by gathering initial performance and cultural insights directly from our athletes. They were looking for a cleat that fit so well that you forgot you were wearing it, like a sock with studs attached to it. We took this on as a challenge and we were able to engineer an internal fit system that removed the necessity of laces to lock you in.This new platform allowed us to reimagine what a football cleat looked like. We no longer had laces to work around and we knew we had to create something that was immediately understandable yet boldly iconic. Something that was advanced but at the same time familiar. So we began with a single word, “IMPACT”. We started to conceptualize about what “IMPACT” looked like, smelled like, felt like etc., and this exercise led directly to the visualization of the 14

“Pow” graphic that integrated perfectly with the support we needed around the base of the cleat to keep the foot from spilling over the side during lateral movements. Overall, this was a fun project that continually improved throughout the rounds of testing and I am proud of the way our team came together to make something truly unique. Aric Armon is a footwear designer from Milpitas, CA. His passion for sport and design began during his time as a Student-Athlete at the Academy of Art University where he served as the captain of its first track team. Performance innovation was a natural marriage between his creative curiosity and his experience playing sports. During his career he has had the opportunity to design across multiple categories including football, baseball, basketball, running, training, and lifestyle. His innovative solutions aim to make the best athletes in the world even better.

The highlight of his career to date has been designing the cleats worn by Superbowl MVP Patrick Mahomes.Most recently, Aric has begun focusing his talents on sharing his knowledge with young designers through teaching the process of footwear design, innovative designthinking, prototyping, and storytelling. He wants the new generation of creatives to know that there is more than one way to make it in the sports world.

Ashley Comeaux

VP Product Design Allbirds Nike React Sertu | 10th Collection The Nike React Sertu is a lifestyle model that was created as part of Nike’s 10th collection. The 10th was an homage to Nike’s co-founder Bill Bowerman who served in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division infantry during World War II. This collection experimented with global expressions of military and workwear influences to deliver unique product expression and aesthetics for Nike Sportswear. The React Sertu is a harmonious blend of tech and craft that celebrates a functional woven upper, surrounded by patterned and textured, supporting overlays that add an organic and natural vibe and feel to the overall execution. Its thin, technical tongue and heel counter, balance the otherwise handcrafted quality of the upper, and pairs perfectly with the organic nature of the React midsole unit. It was so much fun to conceptualize the Nike

React Sertu as the inaugural expression of The 10th collection. I had the ability to take multiple points of inspiration and channel them through this design to lead the vision for the world I had ventured to build with the 10th family of products alongside an incredibly talented team of designers. Together we worked to breathe life into a fresh, new take on lifestyle solutions for the Nike customer. And, if you hold this model in hand with the toe pointed towards you, you’ll find it captures an uncanny resemblance to the Star Wars character, Jar Jar Binks! I look forward to creating a NEW favorite sneaker with Allbirds, alongside my incredible team, in pursuit of our mission of making better things in a better way. Ashley Comeaux was born and raised in Miami, Florida, and is a daughter to Honduran immigrant parents. She began her design journey in high school at Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami’s Design District, where she immersed herself in art and design at an early age. Upon graduation, she continued her design trajectory at The College for Creative Studies in Detroit MI, earning a BFA in Product Design. She kicked off her footwear industry experience with footwear design internships at Reebok and Converse, respectively while attending college, and ultimately landed a full-time position as a Footwear designer for Nike upon graduation in 2010. Ashley spent 10.5 years working as a designer in various categories including Men’s Lifestyle Basketball & Training, Women’s Lifestyle,

IMAGE COURTESY OF ASHLE Y COME AUX

Energy/ Purpose & Athletes, with her last role as Design Director of Purpose & Athletes Product. Ashley joined Allbirds in January of 2021. Allbirds is a sustainable footwear and apparel company based out of San Francisco with a mission to reverse climate change through better business. Ashley keeps busy as a wife and mother to 2 daughters, Sam (5), and Mia (2). She enjoys staying active and creative in her spare time.

Precious Hannah

Designing the Jordan Crib Bootie was more of a solution to an issue that I saw on the infant side of the shoe game. As a new mom, I struggled with putting my son’s shoes on because I couldn’t get his foot in comfortably. Although I loved rocking AJ1’s, my newborn son didn’t enjoy the drawn-out process of putting them on him. The soles on the infant shoes were stiff and uncomfortable, and the entry was challenging. So, while on maternity leave, I took a pair of infant AJ1’s, cut them up, removed the stiff sole, and came up with a more infant/parent-friendly AJ1 concept. You could now velcro the side for ease of entry and not worry about the comfort of the infant’s foot because the sole was now soft and flexible while being durable. The best part is that it still kept the legendary vital details of the AJ1. The Jordan Crib Bootie is one of my favorite shoes because now parents can have their infants rock their favorite AJ1’s in comfort. Precious Hannah is a Multi-disciplinary Designer across Footwear and Accessories with ten years of experience working alongside a Fortune 500 company. After studying Product Design in Detroit, Michigan, at College for Creative Studies, she was inspired by functional design implementing those studies into her design processes, understanding the consumer’s needs for solutions. Over the years, Precious has accomplished over nine design patents and been a part of multiple mentorship programs to help BIPOC designers reach their goals in design. 16

IMAGES COURTESY OF PRECIOUS HANNAH

Multi-disciplinary Designer across Footwear + Accessories Jordan Crib Bootie

Jeffrey Alan Henderson Founder, And Them Creative Yeezy 350 v2

Very rarely does a designer get to take a conceptual idea from sketch to engineering to production with everything intact. That’s exactly what happened with the v2. We had the base of the v1, and Ye just wanted to add the TPU cage from the Kobe 10. So we started from there and evolved every detail from last shape to knit design without skipping any steps. The interior was so detailed because of the shape and manufacturing technique that we asked the factory to last the sample inside-out to resolve fit and function. What’s really wild are the number of

folks I continue to work with and learn from that were on this project - from designers to factory developers. Living in NYC means you run into every shoe you worked on or your friends worked simply by riding on the train. Being reminded of your work and theirs is a constant reminder that folks appreciate the effort. During his 15+ year career within Nike, Inc., this engineer-turned-designer built the creative team in Tokyo, led the $1.5B Sport Running category, reshaped the $1B NSW Running cate-

gory, and rebirthed the $500M ColeHaan innovation. Since leaving the Swoosh, Jeffrey Alan Henderson’s creative agency, And Them has been responsible for leading design and engineering for brands like Yeezy and Everlane. The Nike Max+ 2009, ColeHaan Lunargrand, the Everlane Tread, and Yeezy 350 v2 are examples of Jeffrey’s work in footwear, but he is more excited to talk to you about his leadership positions with FC Harlem, the Business of Sports School in NYC, and Knoll.

IMAGES COURTESY OF JEFFREY AL AN HENDERSON

Senior Fellow - Advanced Leadership Initiative, Harvard University NIKE AIR FORCE 1 Long after the style was first introduced in 1982, and as it approaches its 40th anniversary, the NIKE Air Force 1 remains one of the most beloved, top selling sneakers of all time! The creatives at NIKE acted on a hunch more than two decades ago that its potential as a blank canvas could keep the style alive at a time where the line between performance and lifestyle was blurring. That hunch paid off. The discipline of color and materials design in the sneaker industry took off too. The triple white colorway remains its best seller, but the number of iterations of this iconic style has reached into the thousands. Everyone has their chance to put their own spin on the AF1. Here’s to the next 40 years!

Reebok Zig Kinetica The introduction of the Reebok ZIG Kinetica was a strong story for the brand when released in 2020, harkening back to the original, bold ZIG profile first introduced a decade earlier. The iconic brand franchise was unmistakably Reebok; the recognizable zig-zag midsole had been updated with an innovative underfoot cushioning system and a style that perfectly balanced performance and lifestyle. A recognizable brand franchise made its return with the new ZIG. I loved this shoe for so many reasons: most impor18

tantly it looked and fit great, it proudly displayed the return of the beloved Reebok vector logo, and brought the brand back to its confident, bold roots. Karen has been a designer by training and practice for over four decades, and today is a practicing activist for design. Her social impact fellowship focus at Harvard is “Inclusion by Design: Gender Diversity in Design and Design for Gender Diversity”. Encouraging women to pursue paths of leadership, harnessing and amplifying the power and wisdom of female design leaders and helping to assure that the female body is considered through relevant data that is used to craft policy drives her next chapter. Karen was a Global Creative Director at NIKE for 12 years and most recently Vice President Creative Direction + Future at Reebok.

IMAGES COURTESY OF K AREN KOREILLIS REUTHER

Karen Korellis Reuther

Drew Little

Footwear Designer, Adidas AF1 Experimental The nostalgia of walking into a small mom-and-pop sneaker store and seeing the plastic wrapped shoes is the foundation for what drove the design and inspiration. The idea that the shoes underneath the plastic are so precious and in need of being preserved is also linked to the store wanting to maintain a standard of excellence and quality is something that I’ve always found interesting in sneaker culture. Trying to capture that essence in a model like the AF1 which is recognizable from the stance and panels alone served as a unique challenge and posed the question, can you leave everything the same and simply implement a new process that’s familiar but at the same time overlooked? Drew Little is a footwear designer currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. Originally hailing from Milwaukee, WI, Drew understood early on that his dreams of playing in the NBA were slim to none and shifted gears to still be around the culture of basketball while designing sneakers for the world’s next generation of players, makers and doers. Drew is constantly following the path his curiosity and passion take him wherever that may lead to. Drew enjoys traveling to new cities, visiting art museums, playing sports, reading and discovering new music / artists, and bringing creative ideas to life. IMAGES COURTESY OF DREW LIT TLE

Kimberly Shane

Designer, Champion B-Loyal Team Basketball Shoe My goal was to capture the Jordan brand essence of athletic luxury in a team shoe that could meet the needs of any position and had a balance of on-court performance with off court style. The core inspiration was the stingray, which represented Jordan’s low to the ground, stealth way of play on court. I like using things that are not man made as inspiration, because I feel it breathes new life into the product. I wanted to make sure the design allotted for bold color blocks and a wide range of material options, signature elements for a great team shoe. It needed to perform in a way that accommodated any position, so I kept it low to the ground and exposed zoom air in the heel. The icing on the cake was the nod to the AJ Vl and the contrast stitching details which gave it that urban appeal to transition off court. Since I began my footwear career in 97 I’ve always wanted the opportunity to design a basketball shoe but the opportunities for women designers especially in the performance space was few and far between. Thankfully Dr. D’Wayne Edwards took a chance on me and let me spread my wings on this project. The B-Loyal was well received and was worn by the men’s and women’s UNC college team that year. It’s one thing to create a shoe and have it

hit retail which is a huge accomplishment, but to see that product you designed being worn by your target consumers takes that achievement to the next level. Kimberly Shane is a designer for Champion and is currently creating new and innovative performance basketball product for the brand. In addition, she is also the founder of Wee3. A kids footwear company that has uniquely combined her love for learning with her passion for shoes. Her belief is one that says that when you get; you should give and when you learn you should teach. She is a mentor and lifelong learner. Kimberly has 25 years of experience designing footwear for brands such as Adidas, Converse, Ryka, BBC Int., Nike, and the Jordan brand; in addition, created her own design consultancy, E.M. Shane Inc., helping start-ups bring their footwear dreams to life. She’s a trailblazer and became the first African American woman footwear designer for both Nike and the Jordan brand. She’s also designed footwear for Gwenn Stefani, Andre Ward and Luc Mbah a Moute “former Houston Rockets NBA player.” Originally from Miami, Kimberly majored in automotive design and received her BFA from CIA in Cleveland Ohio. Her ultimate goal is to become an Angel investor but, in the meantime, she continues to mentor and inspire the next generation of designers.

IMAGES COURTESY OF KIMBERLY SHANE

IMAGE COURTESY OF CHERESSE THORNHILL-GOLDSON

Cheresse Thornhill-Goldson

Design Director, adidas S.E.E.D. Nike Cricket World Cup Collection, 2015 My immersion into the sport of Cricket began in 2013 when I was charged with the design direction of Nike’s Cricket footwear line for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. I specifically designed the statement silhouettes that would be worn by the most elite cricketers around the world including Ravichandran Ashwin (Bowler), Ajinkya Rahane (Batsman) and Umesh Yadav (Bowler) of the India national team. The Nike Accelerate 2 and Dominate 2 are two of the 100+ shoes I’ve designed throughout my career and on the short list of the ones that are near and dear to my heart. Cricket gave me the opportunity to reconnect with my late grandfather, an avid sportsman, who played cricket growing up in Trinidad & Tobago, the twin islands off the coast of Venezuela in the West Indies. Designing cricket shoes taught me a lot about material compounds, manufacturing processes and the factory capabilities of our partners in Vietnam, but most importantly it taught me the power of design to fuel all athletes. Those at the very top of their careers playing in the World Cup to young athletes just beginning their cricket journey, to transcend their preconceived limitations and achieve their dreams. Being the lead designer afforded me the opportunity to travel the world studying these elite and amateur cricketers throughout India, Dubai, London, and

Sri Lanka. Cricket shoes aren’t just equipment. They support the athlete’s style and performance in every step, sprint, run, pivot and hop on the pitch. I learned there’s a direct correlation to the hard work and dedication I put into considering every element on the shoe from its interaction with the ground and environment to its interaction with the athlete to either promote their performance or diminish it. I held the power in my sketch to help our athletes look great, feel great and play great around the world. This was the ultimate honor. Cheresse is a design leader who has been in the footwear industry for 15 years. Her career began in 2007 at Nike Inc. in Beaverton, OR. During her nearly 10 year career at Nike she designed footwear across the basketball, running, cricket, women’s training and Jordan Brand categories. In 2016 she relocated back to her hometown of Miami, FL to teach product design at both the college and high school level including her own high school alma mater. Cheresse simultaneously launched No Shoes Creative, design consultancy, advancing brands like Champion and adidas. In January 2020, she moved to Brooklyn, NY to lead the adidas S.E.E.D. (School for Experiential Education in Design) program. As Design Director of adidas S.E.E.D., she is part of the team transforming the footwear industry and cultivating the next generation of diverse design talent. 21

IMAGES COURTESY OF MICHAEL DITULLO

Michael DiTullo

Designer Defender, Foot Defender Every 30 seconds someone loses a limb due to complications with diabetes, a condition that is 100% preventable. From 2009 to 2015 lower extremity amputations for diabetic patients increased by 50%. Approximately 33 million Americans have diabetes, 3.3 million have Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) and 24% of those DFUs will lead to an amputation in 6 -18 months. This is unacceptable. We can do better. Current prescribed leg braces are designed for fractures and sprains and do not alleviate pressure on the bottom of the foot. Alleviating pressure is critical to heal DFUs and prevent amputations. The Footdefender is specifically designed to reduce pressure on the bottom of the foot through a combination of locking the ankle at a specific angle, negative heel drop raising the balls of the feet, and a proprietary viscoelastic material under the foot called Absorbium. In addition to being functionally superior, the Footdefender is easy to put on properly and take off due to its unique removable spat design. Lastly, the Footdefender looks more like an athletic shoe and less like a medical device to reduce the visual stigma of needing to wear the product. Unused products fail 100% of the time, so we designed the Footdefender to be acceptable to be worn daily until the patient is heeled. With this product I 22

feel like I got to use all of the skills, techniques, and technologies I learned designing footwear for brands like Nike, Jordan, Cole Haan, Converse, Foot Joy and Brooks and apply them to a product that helps people keep their limbs. This was a really special one for me. Michael DiTullo has been designing iconic products for some of the world’s best brands for more than 20 years. He has worked with an amazingly wide assortment of companies including Nike, Google, Honda, Timex, Chantal, Converse, Motorola, Salesforce, Hasbro, Arc Electric Boats and Kirei. Prior to starting his eponymous design studio, Michael was Chief Design Officer for Sound United where he oversaw industrial design, UX, packaging, product management, and marketing creative. He spent several years as creative director for frog design’s San Francisco studio and nearly a decade at Nike where he worked directly with Michael Jordan, Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter, and Dwayne Wade. Michael is listed on over 30 patents and has won numerous awards including the IDSA’s special lifetime achievement award for contributions to the design industry, an award won by design luminaries such as Jonathan Ive, Charles Eames, and Raymond Loewy. When Michael was 13 years old he said, “I want to draw stuff from the future” for a living, and that is still the best description for what he does.

Joey Zeledon

Designer at Joey Zeledón LLC Clark’s Originals line The Taiga collection was a 2007 modern take on the Clark’s Originals line of shoes that includes Wallabees, Desert Boots, and Desert Treks, which have been in production since the mid 20th century. It takes the classic ingredients of the Originals line—a crepe rubber slab outsole, tumbled leather uppers, waxed cotton laces, and chunky stitching—and remixes them within a new sneaker silhouette. The collection contained 2 hi-tops and 2 low-tops. It was a unique opportunity to build on an icon and extend a line that has such a storied history and an appeal that has spanned generations and cultures.

Sometimes an industrial designer. Always a practitioner of the imagination. In a past life, maybe a kid doodling in the back of a Bauhaus classroom? Or at least the kid doodling in the back of Zoller Elementary in upstate New York where I grew up. The things Joey Zeledon creates are meant to make the mundane, magical. To give the objects we surround ourselves with a little levity. To break us out of the expectations of the way reality works. Since graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology’s ID program in 2006, he has led design teams at Clarks, Continuum, Smart Design, Steelcase and HP and recently launched his own studio. •

IMAGE COURTESY OF JOE Y ZELEDON

Community Flywheel

COMMUNITY SERIES

Close Knit Resilience. By Sascha Mombartz, Founder of Office for Viusal Affairs and Close Knit

Communities often come together in very informal ways: someone gathers people with similar interests or experiences or a group of people assembles around a shared interest or behind a common cause. A sense of belonging and trust is built over time through shared experiences and conversations. The informality lets the community evolve rapidly and organically, yet it also allows challenges and conflict to arise. That’s where resilience comes in. As important as it is, creating resilience can often feel tedious and not relevant to the core purpose or activities of the community. Much of building resilience is about agreements, rules, roles, and hairy topics like power or processes that either preempt or resolve challenges. Resilience comes from the Latin word “jump back” or “recoil” and has its root in “leap.” In systems thinking, resilience refers to a system returning to its original state and preserving the same function, structure and identity after internal or external pressures. In communities, though, the current state is merely the foundation on which change and growth is built on. The Boulder Center for Resilience defines it very pointiantly as “the capacity to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce forward in the face of shocks or stressors.” In the Close Knit framework, members care for each other and their shared vision and purpose through Belonging and Trust. In turn, this necessitates resilience to preserve, evolve and grow what a community has collectively created. The three elements of Belonging, Trust,

and Resilience make up the community fabric. Resilience is what gives this fabric the ability to stretch, adapt, and extend while being strong enough not to tear or fray.

Resilience is what gives this fabric the ability to stretch, adapt, and extend while being strong enough not to tear or fray. Resilience is created through activities in four areas: capacity, communication, governance, and sustainability. Before we look at them in detail, I want to touch on one important aspect that affects all of those areas: how centralized or decentralized a community is.

Centralized to Decentralized Communities, like all networks, fall somewhere on the spectrum between centralized and decentralized. In very basic terms centralized communities have the advantage of speed and control whereas decentralized communities can have a further reach and more adaptability. Part of that adaptability and reach is due to the fact that large parts can be self-organized. On one hand, this self-organization is extremely powerful as it gives everyone the opportunity and possibility to act. On the other hand, if these efforts are not well aligned, they can lead to chaos. This kind of collaboration and integration is very challenging and becomes even more so with scale. If you look at many of our larger communities, such as our government, they are mostly centralized, compared to smaller communities like your local club or community garden, which 25

Centralized

Distributed

tend to be more decentralized. This has to do with the complexity of managing many different opinions and ideas and unifying them in common stories or collectively agreed upon processes. You will see how scale and organization of efforts along the spectrum of decentralization play into capacity, communication, governance, and sustainability.

Capacity Capacity is about how members contribute to and benefit from the community. It’s the capacity around the relationships they build, the skills and resources that they bring, and what members collectively co-create. These can be tangible in the form of goods and services or the spaces and places they create for each other, or intangible

Internal Purpose for Members 26

Decentralized

in form of emotional support or joy they provide to one another. It’s both what members can contribute, and what others or the community as a whole can offer them. This capacity determines the opportunities and possibilities within the community, but also what the community is capable of achieving in the world. This capacity can be reflected in an internal or external purpose of the community. Internal when its for its members, like at the Park Slope Food Coop, a high quality yet affordable cooperative supermarket in Brooklyn (more on them later). An external purpose could be Greenpeace, where a large distributed group of people is trying to have an outsize effect on how we engage with our environment.

External Purpose for the World

Communication Much of what we do with others is about communication and its many flavors. We’ll focus on 3 of them: Storytelling, documentation and feedback.

“ Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.” —Yuval Noah Harari Storytelling helps us unify our actions around a shared dream or goal that a community is striving for. It’s a powerful organizing and communication medium and can help us understand the larger picture while giving us relatable examples. Yuval Harari has detailed how pivotal stories are in our human evolution in his three books about humankind and our culture. On a smaller and more pragmatic scale, stories can become powerful mediums of knowledge sharing and common processes. These in turn allow new members to effectively contribute and new work to be integrated into the larger whole.

Documentation on past decisions or instructions on a process acts as a centralized source of truth for members across branches of the network. This becomes especially important the more decentralized a community is, in order to align the many parallel and disparate efforts. The Park Slope Food Coop for example has 17,000 members who do 70% of the work. A daunting task, which is why they have very detailed rules and processes. In the 30 years that the Coop has existed, much has been written about it and the complexity of operations and its drawbacks, yet in my time as a member there, I have not come across a single rule or process that felt unreasonable or unjustified. Granted there is a lot of redundancy and emphasis on processes, but all are in an effort to keep the community’s work aligned and resolve issues preemptively. Feedback’s core tenets are about how we talk and listen to each other and deal with complex contentions and difficult situations. Differences in values, beliefs, or norms, none of which have

an objective truth or right answer in addition to communication styles and misunderstandings often form the basis of conflict. In many cases it’s less about what happened but how we dealt with it. A good feedback and resolution process is based on the principles of nonviolent communication, that emphasize our experience and feelings rather than making assumptions about the intentions of others. Another helpful framework is Otto Scharmer’s 4 levels of listening that help focus the attention on and align with the speaker.

The goal should always be to empower as many members as possible, as this allows the community to better self organize and create a stronger sense of belonging through ownership of ideas and decisions. Governance People collaborate on a foundation of values and agreements, that are translated into rules and processes, which support decision making in an orderly fashion. A lot of this is about power and who has access to resources, the ability to make and execute on decisions. As you might have guessed, this is one of the more expansive and complicated topics reaching from who sets the narrative, over what happens to marginalized voices, or the decision making processes, and if voting is based on consensus or consent. The goal should always be to empower as many members as possible, as this allows the community to better self organize and create a stronger sense of belonging through ownership of ideas and decisions. As discussed in my article on belonging, a strong sense of belonging is created not only by a member belonging to a community but also by the community belonging to them. It’s also essential to be explicit about governance, values, power, and ownership, as this forces a community to realize and carefully consider its organizing dynamics. Fascinatingly we actually have a strong urge to behave in line with the expectations of our peers. For more on that, see Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments from the 1950’s. 28

In addition to being explicit, it is most helpful to translate rules into actionable processes. For example if a guiding principle is to be self-reliant and self-organized, a helpful way of expressing that is letting members know that they can always initiate a task on their own and loop others in rather than wait for others to start. Think of a co-living community or even your family’s household – it works best when duties and responsibilities follow a posted schedule, lapses have clear penalties, members know how best to engage the group in a decision making process, and everyone feels empowered to speak up and be heard.

Sustainability Healthy communities are powered by a reciprocal loop of contributions between members and the community. This means that as much as members give, they also need to get something out of being part of the community. What people give and receive can be a plethora of things: goods, services, support, or a listening ear or friendship. This might sound transactional but it’s not necessarily. To me, transactional or generous have to do with trust, time, and type of interaction. The less sure you are that someone will return a favor, the faster and in the same form you want it repaid, and the more transactional your interaction is. In contrast, if you have faith that you will be helped when you need it, however you need it, even far into the future you’re giving and receiving generously. The bottom line is that all this requires members to participate. The challenge is that often members have different engagement levels, based on their current life situations and priorities. A community builder should always expect this and be prepared to try to find out what needs and motivations members have, so that a lurker can become a contributing member and relieve some of the pressures from highly engaged members. In some instances a member might have not found a good way to contribute or even know where to start. That said it’s important to realize though that people are part of many different communities and that engagement

Marketing Growth levels will vary over time and by community, and that those flows and ebbs are normal and test a community’s resilience. Often much of the work falls back to the founding members, community builder, or core team and it can quickly become overwhelming. It’s important to find a balance between contributing time and energy and in return being sustained by the community.

Growth Growth is often misunderstood as a driving force for sustainability. It’s undeniably important, yet it’s often reduced to a few basic metrics like growth of memberships or growth of funds. Membership growth, especially when it happens fast, can actually be quite counterproductive and lead to lots of governance and sustainability challenges. Growth can happen in many different areas such as relationships among members, personal growth, or through the community’s outputs and efforts. Rather than growth strictly being quantitative it can also be qualitative.

Belonging, Trust & Resilience A strong sense of belonging and trust are needed in every community, especially in its inception and early days. As things mature, more members join and more efforts are underway by members, and building resilience to align efforts becomes increasingly important.

Community Growth Resilience starts with understanding its degree of decentralization, if you have an internal or external purpose, and what the community’s capacities are to achieve or work towards that purpose. A big part of that resilience comes from creating the right governance structure, inclusive, comprehensive yet not too complex processes and making rules that are explicit and actionable. Lastly resilience is built by operating on an energy and time net positive budget, by engaging all members and ensuring people’s needs, desires, and ambitions are met, and focusing on the growth of members and their relationships.

A big part of that resilience comes from creating the right governance structure, inclusive, comprehensive yet not too complex processes and making rules that are explicit and actionable. When Belonging, Trust, and Resilience come together, a powerful flywheel is created that makes membership desirable and the members’s efforts flourish. I hope this framework and its principles will help you build strong and thriving communities. •

EDUCATION • COMMUNITY

S.E.E.D. Soles. Breaking Barriers, Planting Seeds, & Charting Pathways By Cheresse Thornhill-Goldson, S.E.E.D. Design Director & Jessica Smith, S.E.E.D. Co-Founder Born in love. Raised in hustle. Refined by the streets. It all started with a basketball and a notebook. At first it was to keep up with her brothers. It evolved into cherished time with her father. And then, it took root in her heart. Everything about the game of basketball fueled her: the competition, the comradery, the style, the fashion, and of course, the shoes! Seeing her late-night blacktop work translated into buckets and shammies. Knowing her vision and leadership inspired greatness in her teammates. Feeling the grind of the city and the walls between blocks and crews erode in an instant as the announcer picked up the mic and the crowd went crazy. It was more than a game; it was life. It was more than a team; it was friendship. It was more than an audience; it was community. As her high school years inched by, the reality of hanging up her sneaks became increasingly real. Now, all she was left with were memories and an unfunded shoe obsession. The things she had loved, that had been her identity, couldn’t carry her forward into the next phase of her journey. Or so she thought… Blue collar workers were who she saw around her, people working two or three jobs to put food on the table. Her parents passed in the night working odd hours to ensure someone was home to support them. She admired her parents’ ability to turn love and hustle into a close-knit family unit, but she couldn’t imagine going down the same path. With a roof over her head, she took

Informal networks are a gateway for inequity, allowing social and cultural capital disproportionally privileging some and perpetuating discrimination for marginalized communities. the train to the only stop that gave her more time… community college. It only took one week of classes for that pit to develop into a boulder, realizing that this open road of exploration was merely a high school extension that lacked the support or guidance she needed to explore how to turn her passion into purpose. While fictional, Dream’s story is that of many young women of color from under-resourced communities around the world. There is a debate spanning centuries on the purpose of education and its relationship to workforce readiness. Is education intended for the sole purpose of personal edification? Or is there a place for career and technical education within the educational system? The lack of resolution in this ongoing debate has resulted in career interest formation and preparation frequently being managed through informal networks. Informal networks are a gateway for inequity, allowing social and cultural capital disproportionally privileging some and perpetuating discrimination for marginalized communities. The global athletic footwear industry is a 97-billion-dollar industry (1) with black and 31

brown consumers fueling a disproportionate percentage of purchases. So how can it be that the main relationship the Black and Brown community has with the industry is purchasing? The industry is founded on the richness of cultures that lack access to benefit from the profitability it drives. The problems that sit behind Dream’s story are vast. Consumerism, the inequity of underrepresentation, the business impact of homogeneous teams…the list goes on. But let’s just sit with this one.

While the structure of our society has created that reality, we are a fearless team committed to break inequitable systems by overlaying an equity lens across the education to career pathway. Imagine if when you were born, or the moment your child was born, that someone would tell you that everything about your life had already been determined. The dimensions of your identity, your age, socioeconomic position, race, ethnicity, 32

nation of origin, and gender could predict the schools you would attend, the profession you would have, your earning potential, and much more. While the structure of our society has created that reality, we are a fearless team committed to break inequitable systems by overlaying an equity lens across the education to career pathway. So that little girls like Dream, who love basketball, fashion, art, and sneakers, can take their passions cultivated as children and have clear and accessible pathways to turn those passions into meaningful lives and careers of purpose.

The Solution The School for Experiential Education in Design (S.E.E.D.), was founded by Jessica Smith & Liz Connelly within adidas and welcomed its first cohort in January of 2020. The program is a paid two year university alternative, footwear design program for BIPOC women from diverse backgrounds creating further access into the adidas brand and sportswear industry. Upon successful completion of the program each designer tran-

sitions into a permanent full-time design role within adidas. The program is housed at the adidas Brooklyn Creator Farm in partnership with Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design, the first HBCU dedicated to design located in Detroit, MI. S.E.E.D. is revolutionizing the design, education, and sportswear industries by operating as a diverse talent pipeline, taking a creator-centric approach to design education, and serving as an inclusive design consultancy within the adidas brand fueling the marketplace with consumer relevant products. “Girls like me, an African American girl from Miami, usually didn’t want to go for art or design. Not having enough chances was a barrier for me…S.E.E.D. can inspire the younger generation that’s coming, those that want to design but are afraid to or feel like they don’t have an outlet” said Eliya Jackson, adidas Assistant Footwear Designer, (S.E.E.D. Generation 1).

Talent Pipeline & Humanizing The Recruiting Process S.E.E.D.’s “human centered” approach to talent recruitment eradicates the barriers to entry erected by traditional recruiting practices designed to filter out those who have been under-resourced and overlooked. Our recruiting process, led by co-founder Liz Connelly, focuses on an individual’s ability to communicate who they are as a creative, an ability to exhibit their unique creative superpower, collaborate with others, build community, display a growth mindset, be teachable, learn quickly, and graciously welcome feedback. We conduct design workshops, “Creator Camps,” that enable us to get to know prospective S.E.E.D. design students in an environment focused on fun, learning, compassion, and unity – not competition, isolation, and elitism. “I was someone who didn’t know where I was going in life, I just knew I had to go somewhere, anywhere. I don’t come from money, so I had to drop out of my first year of college…Then all of a sudden this amazing opportunity is at my doorstep, and it brought me back to life and I found my passion in something I never thought

I would…What adidas is doing with the S.E.E.D. program is out of this world, they created this program for women from any background and really took the time to get to know us and our story and look at us for our skills rather than our degree,” said Samantha Alvarado, adidas Assistant Footwear Color Designer, (S.E.E.D. Generation 1).

S.E.E.D. serves as a strategic pipeline for female BIPOC design talent into the industry and the brand. Our creator camp enables us to provide our participants with a mini S.E.E.D. experience focused on leadership skill development via a lesson on identity dimensions and a footwear design lesson focused on consumer insights, product narrative, sketching, color, graphics, materials, storytelling, collaboration, and presentation. Once prospective students have attended as many creator camps as they desire, they are prepared to apply for full-time placement within S.E.E.D. Each July we onboard a new cohort of 6 BIPOC women into the program based in Brooklyn, NY. S.E.E.D. serves as a strategic pipeline for female BIPOC design talent into the industry and the brand.

Creator-Centric Design Education Accelerated By Leadership Traditional post-secondary design programs focus heavily on technical design skills and not enough on leadership skills and helping students identify their point-of-view that brands seek. Designers who have been traditionally trained and attended top design programs within the U.S. still experience a large gap in knowledge once they land their first corporate design job. These gaps may not heavily impact their technical abilities but definitely impacts their design identity (creative uniqueness), confidence, collaboration and their ability to understand and navigate workplace culture effectively. Therefore S.E.E.D. takes a “creator-centric” approach to design education. This means that we center our students’ points-of-view and learning styles, with room to adapt to their needs. We accom33

plish for our students in two years what colleges and universities achieve in four. What accelerates our student’s design skills and career readiness, enabling them to learn and adapt quickly, is our leadership curriculum. Our leadership curriculum focuses heavily on identity, behaviors that fuel innovation, establishment of creative practices, and professional development. Our design curriculum, which is powered by our leadership curriculum, enables each designer to approach design through their own unique lens, instead of designing in the same manner as more senior designers in the industry. We leverage the collective genius of community to accelerate our creators’ growth. We partner with veteran designers as mentors. The open-source nature of our creator-centric approach ensures that S.E.E.D. designers received a well-rounded view of design from an industry perspective. “Having all the wonderful women that are in the program with me, everyone’s just been so supportive. They give me insight into how I should present my work, how I need to story tell. They’re giving you a whole platform and

Cheresse Thornhill-Goldson, Jessica Smith, and Liz Connelly 34

opening the door for you. Ultimately, I just want to be my best me and I want to unleash my inner creative monster”, said Cristina Lopez, adidas Assistant Footwear Designer, (S.E.E.D. Generation 1).

We are keenly aware of the power of meaning and storytelling, which is a key focus of S.E.E.D.’s design philosophy and baked into every product we create, always deeply rooted in consumer insights. Inclusive Design Consultancy S.E.E.D. is strategically positioned at the intersection of business and education which affords our designers the unique opportunity to learn by doing. Our designers are participating in a hands-on learning experience, designing products for real people to be sold at retail stores around the world. Black and brown women make up an extremely small percentage of footwear design teams but are the most marketed to. Therefore, products created for us but not by

us lack truly relevant points-of-view. S.E.E.D. designers embody youthful perspectives of BIPOC women across the country which enables us to offer unique product solutions as we partner with various business units within the brand, operating as an inclusive design consultancy internally and externally. As designers we have the great privilege of ascribing meaning to inanimate objects. Shoes are cultural icons and throughout pop culture we can pinpoint the shoes that defined an era or a moment in history such as Cinderella’s glass slipper, Dorothy’s Ruby Red slippers, Marty McFly’s Nike Air Mags, Kayne’s Red Octobers, Michael Jordan’s “Banned” AJ1 or “Flu Game” AJ XI and Run DMC’s “My adidas” Superstars. We believe no worn product expresses our personality more than shoes. Our shoes carry not only our bodies but our memories and signify special moments in our lives. Our first day of school, our wedding day, the first dunk on a basketball court, our first marathon or our bronzed baby shoes. We are keenly aware of the power of meaning and storytelling, which is a key focus of S.E.E.D.’s design philosophy and baked into every product we create, always deeply rooted in consumer insights.

Product Our first product, designed by S.E.E.D. Generation 1, was the color and material application on the iconic adidas Superstar released in the Spring of 2021. During the midst of the pandemic in March 2020, our team was tasked with inspiring consumers who would have been indoors for months to rediscover nature and its positive effects. With this in mind, we took a utilitarian approach to the color and material choices, focusing on calming shades of olive and dark green reminiscent of the colors of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. We also added pops of khaki, cream, and gold details to complement that palette and the utilitarian product narrative. Color psychology is a key focus within our color design curriculum. As we discovered that orange signifies creativity, the team applied orange to the sock liner and inner lining of the entire shoe to inspire creativity within the wearer. This

colorway resonated with consumers so much so that all 2000 pairs sold out within a few weeks in New York City. S.E.E.D. partnered with the adidas Women’s Originals business unit on our 2nd footwear project and 1st collection. This adidas Forum collection known as “The Journey to Ultimate Confidence” was released around the world in the summer of 2021. The entire collection was born out of the insight that “confidence is a muscle, it’s always present, it just needs to be trained.” The four-shoe collection reveals each chapter of the story, one shoe at a time. The Forum mid, “The Court,” kicks off the narrative with the idea that the basketball court is the new gym, a place to begin exercising confidence. This silhouette celebrates the sport by displaying basketball textured leather on the upper with pops of bright colors inspired by the Pigalle court in Paris. The next chapter of the story, “The Sidewalk” is brought to life by the Forum Low. The front of the shoe signifies the “wind down” of comfort, relaxation and 35

rejuvenation needed after a workout and the rear of the shoe celebrates the “turn up” with friends both of which are needed on the ultimate journey to confidence. The Forum Plus, the third silhouette in the collection, is the plateau of the narrative before the final crescendo. Known as “The Runway” this is the refinement stage where confidence is peaking and revealed via the soft pink synthetic python leather with hints of confident red tones exuding from the seams. The final shoe in the collection we nicknamed “The Met” is the ultimate expression of confidence. The all-red Forum Bold is adorned with synthetic python leather and satin laces. The cherry on top is the “red thread” that connects all 4 shoes together. All four shoes have a red outsole and red interior. Confidence is always present; it just needs to be developed to rise to the surface. This is only the beginning, and we have more products planned to hit the marketplace designed by our Generation 2 cohort. By experiencing the full product creation process from brief to retail, our designers are well equipped by the end of the program to assume full-time design roles within the industry and specifically within adidas. “I instantly fell in love with design and the product we were creating, from the process, consumer, research, sketching and color. It’s been an amazing journey...You have all been an inspiration for me. I couldn’t be more excited to start this next adventure, and I owe it all to S.E.E.D.,” said Samantha Alvarado, adidas

Assistant Footwear Color Designer, (S.E.E.D. Generation 1). Our Generation 1 (2020) cohort have successfully completed the program and have assumed their roles within various business units within the brand such as adidas Basketball, Team Licensing, and Top Creators. It has been amazing to watch our students fully develop into the creative leaders we saw glimpses of during our very first creator camp, and now, they’re out of the nest and taking the world by storm. “To get here it took 1,000 tries but we have made it this far...I will take this opportunity and multiply it by 1000x... This is only the beginning, and this accomplishment is a reminder to always work towards your dreams, no matter how far it seems somehow you will get there!”, said Deannelys Corcino, adidas Assistant Apparel Designer, (S.E.E.D. Generation 1).

The Future The future is bright for S.E.E.D. We will continue to create awareness of creative fields and look to expand opportunities and create pathways within footwear design for women from diverse backgrounds in the U.S., and globally in the future. Our Generation 2 design team is approaching the end of the first year and will transition into the second during the summer. They’ve already completed a footwear colorway and a collection of backpacks for the fall, just in time for “back to school,” both of which will launch next year. We’re presently wrapping up our recruitment process for our third Generation design team and look forward to welcoming them into the program this summer. Our long list of aspirations includes charting courses into the other jobs within product creation such as marketing, development, engineering, and manufacturing. The industry is ripe with opportunity and young creative women of color, like Dream, will be the difference makers. •

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/sportsfootwear-market-102216

SOCIAL IMPACT

Yesterday’s Influencers. By Stephen Opie, Principal, Opie Design Illustrations by Penina Gal

Humankind has dedicated its imagination, dexterity, knowledge, and sensitivity to the development of tools that serve their physical needs and psychological desires. Every product and silhouette is in a constant state of evolution, moving from its original form through a series of rises and plateaus. Success arrives when the product meets the needs of a particular time and place. The creation and iteration of footwear has followed this evolutionary arc. From primitive foot coverings to highly technical devices, from natural elements to synthetic formulations, from high to low, from rounded to pointed, and from the simple to the complex. There is no mistaking the significance of shoes in style and culture. Shoes are interpretations of the conditions around us including the politics, religions, economics, and practicalities that shape our lives, but footwear fashion also produces economic, lifestyle, and political change. The common denominator across these disparate starting points is the person behind the shoe. From early hunter gatherers to the dandies of the 18th century, every time a pair of shoes were created, purchased, repaired or built, a person was behind the choice to wear that shoe. Whether out of necessity, pride, financial want, or a desire to create social change, these key people developed the shoes that have become our footwear lexicon. This is a history of these human bellwethers for our footwear decisions. It’s a history of creators, peddlers, salespeople and craftspeople.

It’s a history of mover & shakers, designers, and icons. It’s a history of yesterday’s influencers. In respect to all of our past influencers, the following list is cut short. There are many influential candidates who could be included. These chosen individuals present a variety of achievements over a broad period of time.

Otzi the Iceman - The First Trail Shoe How can the frozen remains of a man from over 5,000 years ago influence today’s footwear world? The prehistoric mountaineer known as the Otzi Iceman was discovered at a height of more than 10,000 feet in the Otztal Alps near the border between Austria and Italy in 1991. The frozen body was remarkably well-preserved and still clad in primitive clothing, including an animal hide coat, a grass cape, and one shoe. His right shoe was made of various animal skins: bearskin soles, deerskin insteps, and chamois, cow, calf, linden bark uppers. The uppers were worn with fur on the outside and laced up. Dried tree bark was used to weave laces and the shoe was stuffed with hay to keep his feet warm. All of this material was woven between an interlacing twig and thin bark substructure. Although these are the oldest “shoes” ever found, a pair of 10,000-year-old slippers was discovered in Oregon as well as various ancient moccasins found in the Southwest United States. Otzi’s shoe—likely created to enhance mobility in a tough outdoor world—could be called the first identified trail shoe. Experts reproducing the Otzi shoe found it to be remarkably functional. 39

Indeed, the Otzi shoe’s semi-rigid outer structure has been mimicked in new advanced footwear technologies, including shoes with an exoskeleton framework and a multi-layered outer shell for protection, durability, and insolation. Dating back 5,300 years, Otzi happened to pass away in the right place at the right time. In doing so, he provides us with an unexpected example of how ancient shoe construction philosophies are still present in today’s modern footwear world. His hand-made artifacts revealed a glimpse into the deep history of truly function-driven footwear— the primary goal still maintained by most footwear companies.

women in 1902, she was the first leader to attempt to eliminate the practice. However, despite her command, footbinding persisted in secret. Unbound feet proved to be politically dangerous. When armies supporting the traditional regimes marched into a village, women with unbound feet were viewed as Communist sympathizers, while women with bound feet were permitted to go free. Today, thanks in large part to the political influence of Empress Cixi, the inhumane practice of footbinding is a relic of footwear history and is no longer practiced.

Empress Dowager Cixi - Footbound to Foot-free How can one woman influence a long-held cultural custom that has debilitated generations of Asian women and become a magnified social problem for her country’s global positioning? Legend has it that lotus or lily foot slippers first appeared in China in the 11th century when Empress Taki was born with deformed feet. To save her future embarrassment, her father announced that only women with very small feet could be truly feminine and desirable. As a result, women began to bind their feet—a mark of status, beauty, gentility, and sexual attractiveness. Foot binding eventually spread to lower social classes by the Qing dynasty (1636–1912). In 1664, the Manchu Kangxi Emperor attempted to ban the practice, but failed. In some areas, footbinding raised marriage prospects, and by the 19th century, 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% in upper-class Han Chinese women. That is until Empress Dowager Cixi (1835– 1908) entered the debate. Rising from footbound sexual servitude, she came very close to ending over two millennia of a practice that caused significant physical pain to many women. She was a fearless leader, the longest ruling woman in Chinese history, and a early feminist leader. When Cixi issued an imperial decree banning the practice of foot binding among 40

Catherine de Medici - Where Vanity was Born How can solving for a physical shortcoming transform a personal anxiety into a continent-wide cultural influence? In the 16th century, the Medici family was one of the most powerful political entities in the world. The Medici were the supreme rulers of Florence and later of Tuscany. They patronized the arts, produced three popes, and arranged enough royal marriages throughout Europe to ensure their lasting influence. These influence-building marriages included the 1533 betrothal of the then 14-year old Catherine de Medici to the Duke of Orleans, who was to become the next King of France, Henry II. Catherine would be expected to participate in the splendid but notoriously judgmental French Court. Catherine worried

that her short stature would create a negative first impression. In desperation, she sought the aid of an ingenious Florentine artisan. He produced a creation that would cast a spell over the entire French nation by replacing the clunky wooden soles from Catherine’s shoes with a slender padded four-inch heel. Her uplifting shoes were an adaptation of chopines, elevated wooden shoes with both heel and toe raised not unlike modern platform shoes. But unlike chopines, the heel was higher than the toe and the “platform” was made to bend in the middle with the foot. High-heeled shoes quickly caught on with the fashion-conscious men and women of the French court, and spread to pockets of nobility in other countries. The term “well-heeled” became synonymous with opulent wealth. For Catherine, her tailor had concocted a device which endowed her with indefinable allure in her walk and gave her the physical stature she could not have otherwise possessed. As necessity is the mother of invention, Catherine de Medici’s influential legacy lives on as the mother of the modern high-heeled shoe.

tries, leading France to become the world’s leader in taste and technology. The fashions in which he adorned himself were colorful, voluminous, and ornamental. Fittingly, the Sun King’s outfits often emphasized the color red, including on the soles of his high heeled shoes. French history expert Joan DeJean says red was “always a color associated with palaces, with Versailles.” Under Louis’s rule, the higher and redder the heel, the more powerful the wearer. When Louis first started wearing red heeled footwear, he would bestow that honor to certain “in-favor” members of his court and even members of his family. Likewise, if Louis did not favor an individual’s politics, actions or beliefs, that individual would be banned from wearing the royal red on their footwear. In 1660, French shoemaker Nicholas Lestage became shoemaker to Louis XIV, and the heels of Louis’s shoes, some now decorated with miniature battle scenes, were now as tall as five inches. In many ways, Louis’s explicit association of a unique footwear design with political power made him the first footwear celebrity trendsetter. This influence has persisted. His infatuation led to a heel profile forever referred to as the “Louis Heel,” and a red sole remains synonymous with luxury and exclusivity.

Louis the 14th - Monitoring the Aristocracy How can a simple color choice provoke political divisiveness, create social anxiety, and lead to a new representation of power and wealth? Known as the Sun King, Louis XIV established furniture, footwear, clothing, and jewelry indus41

Brummel - Fashion Dandy How can a British common man, before the age of mass communication create a fresh new style, reinvent a persona, and uplift social status?

Matzeliger - The Inventor that Changed the Industry How can a young immigrant overcome a racially divided economic climate to create a game-changing machine?

George Bryan Brummell, better known as Beau Brummell, became an unlikely arbiter of fashion in 18th century Regency England. Born into a working class family, Beau led the trend for men to wear understated beautifully cut clothes and elaborately knotted neckwear. He established the modern man’s suit with tie as a fashion necessity. His style of dress came to be known as dandyism. Brummell’s dandyism encouraged English gentlemen to focus on fit, quality, and immaculate cleanliness in their wardrobes. Brummell’s influence also extended to two key footwear innovations, his new Hessian Boot and the Pantaloon Foot Loop. The Hessian boot reached to the knee with a heart shaped topline and had a decorative tassel at the top of each shaft. Initially used as standard issue footwear for the military officers, the Hessian would become widely worn by civilians as well. The boots had a low heel and a semi-pointed toe that made them practical for stirrups. The Hessian boot would evolve into the Wellington boot followed by the rubber work boots known as “wellies.” With the Hessian boot came a pantaloon, replacing knee breeches. The problem with pantaloons was the wrinkles they formed. To fix this, Brummell invented the foot loop—a distinctive fashionable footnote to the ever-present top hat. Brummel assembled details, materials, and constructions from various cultures, then recreated them into works of his own. He was more than a leader in creating a new men’s style— he demonstrated that male fashion could be an objective of its own, that obsessive dressing could increase one’s class status, and that an immaculate outfit contained fashionable and pristine shoes.

Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born in Surinam (Dutch Guiana), South America, in 1852. At the age of ten, Jan worked in the machine shops where his talents were nurtured. Hearing about the rapid growth of the shoe industry in Massachusetts, Matzeliger moved to Lynn in 1877 in search of a better job. In the early New England footwear industry, virtually all shoes were assembled by hand stretching leather or textile around a hard rigid form called a last. This construction technique required great skill and it was assumed that such intricate work could only be done by a craftsman. As a result, these hand-lasters held great power and often demanded pay increases resulting in long periods of work stoppages and unemployment for fellow workers. Matzeliger tried to solve this workplace stranglehold by creating an automated method for lasting footwear. After many years, he came up with a successful prototype. Matzeliger’s machine was able to produce up to 700 pairs a day, a 14-fold increase from an expert hand-laster’s 50. By 1889, there was an overwhelming demand for the machine. Matzeliger formed The Consolidated Lasting Machine Company, which sold lasting machines. In a short period, Matzeliger’s lasting machine revolutionized the American shoe industry and quickly traveled around the world. His invention is still in-use today in most modern footwear factories around the world.

Salvatore Ferragamo - Designer for the Stars How can an inspired youth develop his skill set to such a high level that his craft becomes a world-wide symbol of glamor, prestige and haute couture? Salvatore Ferragamo was born in Naples, Italy, in 1898. His parents were poor farmers and could not buy shoes, so Ferragamo, at age 9, borrowed materials and made them himself. At 14, after

studying shoemaking in Naples, he opened a shop for hand sewn shoes for women. At age 16, he traveled to California and opened a shoemaking shop in Santa Barbara. From 1914 to 1923, Farragamo created footwear for the American Film Company. He then relocated to Hollywood and became the “shoemaker of dreams.” For more than 30 years he shod the stars, from Lillian Gish in the first silent films, to Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. Worried that his shoes were aesthetically pleasing but anatomically hurtful, Farragamo studied anatomy. After much experimentation, he used this knowledge to perfect a steel instep arch support, making his shoes significantly more comfortable. Ever the inventor, Farragamo began to experiment with new materials such as needlepoint, lace, hemp, cellophane, raffia, cork, and even fish skin. With a shortage of materials due to WWII, Ferragamo adapted wood and cork into platform soles and inserted cellophane in place of straps. Inspired by the Italian Renaissance, Ferragamo resurrected the chopine, thus inventing our modern wedge heel. The inventor of several trends, like the famous ‘Vera pumps’ and ‘Cage Heels,’ which became icons in their own right, his designs continue to be seen on Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Chuck Taylor How can one single player through savvy marketing insights and business acumen relabel a product and revolutionize an industry? In 1921, the Converse Rubber Shoe Company signed the endorsement deal that would significantly change sports marketing and the industry. Professional baller turned salesman Chuck Taylor became Converse’s first player-endorser and became the name behind basketball’s first technical product, the “Chuck Taylor.” But this endorsed athlete agreement turned into something far more meaningful to the footwear industry: the first “signature sneaker” of all-time. Chuck immediately became involved in the design process, helping develop the canvas

and vulcanized rubber product beyond the original 1917 creation. His input led to features such as increased ankle support and re-engineering of the rubber compound to increase traction and durability. Taylor, through his savvy understanding of the sporting arena used his influence to promote himself as the sports world’s first professional ambassador thus linking the world of athlete-to-product and paving the road for the future Chamberlain, Bird, Jordan, LeBron and Durant. These past footwear influencers are remembered for their impact on our collective lives. Their creations improved our mobility. Their sensitivities led to new styles. And their skills, fortitude, and passion created jobs, formed companies, and improved economies. As the footwear world looks towards a new generation, there are numerous uncertainties. We don’t know what technology will upend longstanding production processes. We don’t know what cultural mores will drive new trends. As sport and work develop in new directions, we aren’t sure what needs new shoes will be required to fulfill. And we don’t know what unlikely fashion icons will arise, or how political machinations will drive local customs, or how a changing planet will change what we put on our feet. But out of all this uncertainty, we can rely on one thing: there will always be a human mind behind the shoe. As we evolve, our shoes evolve with us. And as we look towards the past, we can know that the future of footwear will be reflective of the people behind the shoes. •

COMMUNITY • SOCIAL IMPACT

Jocelyn Rice: What is your special memory and your connection to footwear? Chris Dixon: Special memory? Oh, man. I think if I had to pick one, it was winning my first competition, Future Sole. It was a Jordan Brand competition led by D’Wayne when he was still at Jordan Brand. I remember being on Facebook and Sa’rah Sabino, who was in high school at the time, had messaged me and said, “Hey, I think you won.” Because we were going against each other in the semi-finals. And they announced it on OSD, Obsessive Sneaker Disorder, that I actually made it to the final. So, that was amazing because I got a chance to actually go to the headquarters – to Beaverton. From Fairview, it’s like going to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, you know what I’m saying? That was the biggest moment. And that’s when I realized that this dream I had of being a footwear designer was something that could actually happen. And actually, going there and seeing some of my favorite designers and going to the innovation kitchen and meeting Tinker and Eric Avar, it was one of those moments that I’ll never forget. It was a crazy experience. JR: That’s incredible. Did you come to this later in your life? Was it something in your youth that you were looking to do?

CD: Definitely found it later in life. When I was in high school, asking counselors, “How can I get into this?” They had no idea what to tell me. “Oh Chris, well, maybe radiology instead of drawing shoes because I have no idea where you’re going to do that.” So no, it was just a dream. I had sports and then I had my hobby, which was drawing. So, it was just me pursuing drawing in just every opportunity I had. Even in college, I went to school for graphic design. I didn’t know industrial design was the way to actually be a designer with product. But every chance I got with graphic design, I did something with shoes. And pursuing basketball, being pretty good at basketball. It was like, “Okay,” after I got to the point where I’m like, “Basketball is not what I want to do.” I realized that what I really wanted to do was draw and conceptualize these things that I just imagined all day. I was 26 when I had the opportunity that I shared, that memorable moment. Which at the time I thought it was too late. The crazy thing about that opportunity was, there was an age limit of 16 the first year. They then bumped it up to 25, and I was turning 26 in July, and the cutoff day was in May. So it was just like this was my time, if any time. JR: Shifting gears a little bit, can you tell me the story behind your most prized pair of kicks?

CD: The World Sneaker Championship, the Dojo, that was 2017. That was my first sneaker. I had done high heels and stuff but that was my first sneaker. I was doing these high heels and then this competition came up where it was 20,000 for the grand prize. And I’m thinking, “I need that money for marketing.” Because I had a big investment in these high heels, but I didn’t have marketing money. So I was going to use that for the high heels, but It reignited my love for sneakers and me having a real story from this story about D’Wayne. It was Black History Month. So, I wanted to make this shoe that was dedicated to Pensole and the first Black man to create a footwear academy. To see that shoe realized in 2018, and I’m getting a pair that I get to wear and really forecasting rear lacing. And seeing people after that, all these rear racing designs come out. That’s my favorite shoe today. I mean, only a few people got it, but that’s my jam. And the sole was a Vibram sole, which is top-tier. Can’t beat the Dojo. JR: Can you tell me what footwear design, saying you’re a footwear designer, what that means to you in one word or a phrase? CD: If I had to use one word, it would be accomplished. Just because it was a dream and it was something that was so far away. You truly have to earn it from all the things and the journeys that you have to go through to actually get to a place where you can say, “I can do that job and I am that. That’s what I do. That’s what people call me to do.” I feel accomplished. After the journey of doing those jobs that you don’t want to do – I sold furniture, I sold mattresses, I sold cars, I moved appliances – after that, to sit down at a desk and draw is a luxury. To actually be able to use your brain instead of your back to work. JR: I know you have a daughter and how much this work means to her – when you see your daughter and you’re watching her carry this on, how does that feel as a dad? And you have a son as well – is he in that same zone? How does that feel? 46

CD: It’s an indescribable feeling. But it is a proud feeling just to know that’s inside of them. And like you said, it’s not forced. So I try to put a lot of things in front of them to do, and whatever they gravitate towards, I support. But in our struggle of moving from North Carolina to Portland, and I didn’t have any childcare so D’Wayne and Suzette allowed me to bring Jade and Julius to Pensole while I did work. So, getting them exposed to things and subconsciously learning from the greatness around them was probably one of the best things ever. So just, I think for her to start actually just doing it and naturally doing it, and doing it better than me, it’s just like sit back and just like, “Wow.” It’s one of those moments you just say, “Wow. I’m glad you’re using with what you have and not just from a footwear perspective, just you’re using that process through all the things that you like, like baking and sewing and it’s just using the process.” It’s really impressive. It’s hard to put that in words. Jade is inspiring me to be better as well, because I know she’s watching. It is truly inspiring and makes me work harder and watch the things that I actually expose them to. JR: So your brand Constant Devel-opment, was there a transition or a light bulb moment? So you were working with D’Wayne at Pensole, and then you started Constant Development while you were there? How did you make that transition? CD: It was while I was there. So, it was right after I won World Sneaker. That sneaker was then stretched into a collection. It was a four style collection. And then I had apparel and I had an accessory, a book bag, and I had the book. So, the book was supposed to come out last and we had some hiccups with manufacturing. And so I just pressed pause on Constant Development.... Because it was feeling forced, like, “Let’s put this collection out.” And everybody was trying to do it. So it was this whole saturated market of everyone’s trying to put out their own sneakers without a purpose. So, I just took a step back. And when COVID hit and things just changed and we were forced to furlough, and we just had time. I started to see the need for activities

and things for children to do because we was in a whole nother world. …. So that’s where it sparked, “Okay. Now it’s time to do the book.” …. It was just one of those things where I had everything done, I still have everything done, but now it’s just the timing of what is needed and what is purposeful for just putting out products. Because I love the earth. I’m a bird watcher. I’m conscious of the things that I create, just because of my experience and seeing the waste. It was like, “We don’t need a new shoe right now. We need something that’s going to help us learn or grow.” So everything was in reverse, but D’Wayne had a big hand in that, just keeping me focused on establishing what creatives need and putting me in spaces where I get to learn and understand the value of giving. Because we know, as creators, we can create shoes over and over again, but it is never going to fill the void of feeling fulfilled.

“ So everything was in reverse, but D’Wayne had a big hand in that, just keeping me focused on establishing what creatives need and putting me in spaces where I get to learn and understand the value of giving. Because we know, as creators, we can create shoes over and over again, but it is never going to fill the void of feeling fulfilled.” But I felt like, with a book, and if I could give this back to my seventh grade self that knew nothing about footwear design, how would I feel? And that really pushed me to just lock in and create the book, as well as just being a part of the community. Ian Williams from Deadstock Coffee, he sparked it, he wanted to do something. He was a big inspiration to that as well. So yeah, that was just I guess the product part of the question. But Constant Development is conscious design and a creative disruption. …. And the courageous devotion, that’s the fourth part, being courageous in what you’re devoted to…. The thought clouds, those are always... I

mean, it’s my aesthetic. So it’s just the thoughts and making the thoughts things. And why are we thinking this? And why should we share this? When should we share this? You know what I mean? When should we disrupt? When should diversity be a thing? It should be a thing all the time. It shouldn’t just be about Black. It should be about all. And I know that just being an army veteran and being exposed to all different cultures. So, it’s all encapsulated into the brand and that’s what we want to share. And I think it’s just purposeful and it won’t stop. Even if it’s slow. That’s the best part of it, it don’t matter if you go slow, don’t matter if you go fast, just don’t stop. JR: So you’ve made a transition into a corporate environment, with Timberland: is this something new for you? CD: This is brand new. I never had the desire to be in the corporate space. It was organic. The way it happened was Timberland partnered with me to do this class in Brooklyn. And having the opportunity to meet the people in a way that they had to share themselves, they couldn’t share their work. You know what I mean? They had to share who they are to these children. And the type of people that were showing up, they were authentically themselves and they wanted to be there. So I fell in love with the people more than the brand. And then, them really believing in what I do and saying, “Hey, Chris, we love what you do. We love who you are. And there’s some spots open, because we see what you’re doing on Instagram, but we don’t want you to stop that.” So that was one of the things that no other brand... It was a lot of brands recruiting. But no one offered that. No one put that on the plate where it made me feel empowered as an entrepreneur, and then to make a dream. Because in North Carolina, Timberland and Jordan, those are must-haves in your rotation. I’ve been a fan of the brand, but knowing they are good people and they’re led by people that care about doing better, it made me like, “Okay. I need to do something different.” Because I didn’t want to be this hypocrite of working at Pensole and telling kids what they could do and 47

I’ve never done it in that space…. So when I was with [Timberland], I felt like I could be myself. And to this day, when I go to work, I’m myself. I wear my hat the way I want to. I’m not going to use these big words that I can’t pronounce. I’m going to express myself. I’m going to be kind. I’m not going to try to overtalk anyone. I’m going to be me and it’s accepted. So that made me want to be a part of the Timberland team and it was the best choice. JR: What’s the biggest moment in footwear culture or footwear history, that you can think of, that was monumental, and where you knew that’s what you wanted to be a part of? CD: It’s two moments. I remember when, I think it was ‘96 when the Jordan 11 first came out. And the reaction of people at school, it was like someone hit the power ball or something, “Yo dude, he got those, he got those.” And kids is rushing to another homeroom just to see this kid’s shoes. And I’m like, “Yo, what’s...” Because I’m coming from Germany, I’m not really understanding the sneaker culture. From third to fifth grade, I was in Germany. I was on an army base. So it was a different culture. I almost felt like I was on the West Coast because it was a big gang culture in Germany, on the army base. You wouldn’t even believe. So it was one of those things where you see a lot of kids from a lot of different places. It’s hard to explain. It was just a melting pot of different people. And there was nothing to say this is what the culture is, you know what I mean? So when I got to the States, it was like another world again. Trying to figure out what does cool mean? Because in Germany, cool was something different, like Doc Martens and Birkenstocks. But just to see the reaction of some kids rushing this, just to see the shoe. It was like, “Wow.” And then the moment for me, when I knew I really wanted, it sparked, who did that was the Foamposit, was it the second Foamposit that came out with the zipper. So Foamposit, that’s my favorite shoe of all time. Because that shoe made me say, “Who did that?” And go to the library and research this shoe and try to figure out who did it. 48

And I found out Eric Avar designed this shoe. And then they had sketches and I was like, “Oh, this is something.” And that shoe made me write a letter to Nike, like, “How can I do what this person did?” And I never got a response, but it just gave me the energy and the push to be curious about who did that? It was like an outer space shoe. It’s still ahead of its time. JR: Why do you think footwear inspires people so much? CD: First, it’s a need. We all need shoes, at some degree, to do so many different things. And the way those things are created, they’re created with different stories. So it creates different conversations and it creates different opinions. So it’s always going to be talked about. And the timing of moments and in our culture and in our world, in the way things are released or the way things are told, it’s always going to be something that people are going to talk about or want or desire. JR: I call myself an outdoor futurist. I work from the future, the past, the present. I time travel all day to create. And so I’m wondering what for you, do you think, when you time travel, when you go to the future of footwear, what does it look like to you in the future? CD: This is a great question. The reason why I share on Instagram is to share what I think the future is going to be. And that could be the next season, or what I want it to be. So some of the ideas and the concepts I share is something that I want the future to look like, or it’s something I want to see in the future and hope someone will grab it…. And that’s where my focus is, is where I want Timberland to be as a boot company and the opportunities I have to make that happen. And community and diversity and including people that look like us to get outdoors and really get inspired by what God has created. Because, like you were saying, these opportunities, these lessons during COVID, I was a inside... When I couldn’t go outside, it made me want to go outside.

And when I start going outside, I started really appreciating what God was giving me and what I was seeing through nature. And I just became a bird watcher and I found peace in that. And I found inspiration in the different birds that I was seeing and the color palettes that were put into these little creatures. And I go home and research these guys and I’ve got another color palette to put in a shoe, you know what I’m saying?

So being a part of an outdoor company, that's what I really want to push, is go get inspired by not what's on the screen but what's right outside your door.

drama that the world gives us. And just let it all come down by just letting nature come in. I love it. Before the new year, I actually went on a hike, hiked up a mountain in the snow. First time I ever did it. And I was just like, “I’m so glad I did it.” I felt accomplished. I took the hard way, you know you’ve got those like trails where you go to easy route, we went the hard way. And it was like, “I’m glad I did that because I could have been at home just chilling, but I challenged myself.” And then getting to the top, and then it was the freshest air I ever breathed. I don’t know, I just felt like I’d got a trophy. •

So those are like my little secret weapons, and it gives me peace. It brings me peace and it’s calming, but I think that’s what I want us to feel, you know what I mean? So being a part of an outdoor company, that’s what I really want to push, is go get inspired by not what’s on the screen but what’s right outside your door. JR: I’m excited for you to go down that road. I’m glad Timberland has you and the perspective of being someone who was inside and then going outside. It’s really, really exciting. CD: I’m glad you’re excited about that thought because it’s a mixture of perspectives. Being a athlete and a basketball player, and then just being this guy that’s a dad that just needs to go for a walk, you know what I’m saying? That lets the rain hit him now. Usually, I have an umbrella, but now I let the rain hit me and listen, you know what I’m saying? Those things are, I think they’re so underrated from a human perspective. And I mean, I’ve been called a bird nerd. My mom called me a bird nerd, but I was like, “I love that. Thank you.” If you really observe those creatures, they’re not really worried about nothing. And it just makes me like, “Why should I be worried if they’re not?” They just singing. ….It is just one of those things where I feel like more black and brown people need to experience outdoors and get away from just the hustle and bustle, the 49

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

MISE Reinventing Footwear for the Culinary Industry By Erik Hernandez, Founder, MISE

During my time as lead designer at Vans, I traveled to China every year to meet with contacts in footwear factories. Each time I found myself in Hong Kong, I would visit Yardbird, an amazing yakitori restaurant owned by chefs Matt Abergel and Lindsay Jang. I got to know the two restaurateurs, who share a rich history in product design and branding, and I was always treated like family. Lindsay and Matt expressed interest in collaborating on a shoe for their team that worked for the demands of their restaurant in terms of both safety and style. Vans was happy to offer existing products to the Yardbird team, but creating a shoe for restaurants was not a priority at the time. This led to a simple question—How do we make better shoes for those who step foot in the kitchen? Over three years ago, our team at MISE asked this question, to ourselves and to those in the food and beverage industry, with the hope of revolutionizing kitchen shoes—a market forecasted to reach $4.1 trillion globally by 2026— but more importantly, an industry filled with millions of talented people around the world who serve their communities and flavor our lives.

Asking a Question In 2016, I joined Studio Noyes, my partner Samantha Noyes’s design consultancy. I kept my kitchen shoe idea in mind as the team grew, taking on projects ranging from nurse shoes to basketball shoes for Kanye West, women’s hunting boots to custom-molded slides. Working with startups to top-tier companies like The North Face, Hoka, lululemon, and Yeezy aiming for the next big trend, it became apparent that my

past employers weren’t the only ones ignoring the culinary industry as a potential market. But in early 2019, the studio committed to building a brand dedicated to the culinary industry. We started by reaching out to friends in the food and beverage industry to see what they were wearing and what they thought of it. The Yardbird team were the first surveyed and helped give us a baseline in our questions and methods of gathering information. As we continued to collect surveys from those in the culinary community, our team researched existing kitchen footwear. We found the majority of footwear labeled “kitchen shoes” were not catered to the culinary industry, but were rather products from comfort shoe, safety shoe, and discount shoe companies that were modified to feature non-slip outsoles and water-resistant materials. There were several features on these shoes seen as hindrances when used in the kitchen, including poor support, materials that couldn’t protect against sharps and hot liquids, and traction that faltered on oily surfaces.

Making the Brand MISE was the first name we came up with. So key to the cook’s mindset, the term has been called a religion to those in the industry. And we chose to make it just as important to our brand, by honoring the ethos behind “mise en place”— meaning “everything in its place”—through our standards, design and mindset. We moved on to defining our brand platform— why we exist, our ambitions, promise, position in the market, value to the consumer, and the values we would represent as MISE. We took our time with this, working on brand identity 51

MISE Team: from left to right, Samantha Noyes, Creative Director, Brittany Barker, Content Director, Erik Hernandez, Founder/CEO, Alexandria Jee, Design/Coordinator, Haehee Joung-Phillips, Brand Strategy/Operations

and design inspiration in parallel, as we wanted these pillars to be unwavering and inherent in every aspect of our brand. MISE embodies and embraces that for far too long, culinary industry professionals have been overlooked and underserved. As designers with decades of collective experience in footwear, our team crafted a shoe that not only caters specifically to those in the food and beverage industry, but also to the individual style of the wearer, with a refined look focused on function and sustainability. MISE aims not only to support all roles, identities and culinary paths with shoes made to endure, but also by advocating and giving back to an industry that gives so much to its communities.

the owner/chef would be the one to respond. The pandemic had caused these restaurant owners to furlough their teams and take on any and every job that could help keep the doors open, including social media manager. I realized this was the most direct contact I had had with people in the industry since starting MISE. While picking up takeout, I would take the opportunity to introduce myself and ask if they’d be interested in talking about kitchen shoes it was amazing how many people were ready to share their gripes about the shoes they were wearing. As these conversations evolved into connections with the people who I appreciated for their craft, I became even more inspired to serve this community who constantly served me.

Pandemics Happen Seeing how small businesses were being impacted during the pandemic, I started to look for opportunities to support wherever possible, which incidentally led to the next steps for MISE. I created an Instagram account for MISE and started following restaurants and bars around Portland. I began to message restaurants to check in on their hours and availability, and sometimes just to say hi. I noticed that when I messaged these restaurants, there was a good chance that 52

Product (and Character) Development In order to better understand the current shoes in the market, we bought, tested, and tore them down. We reviewed the most talked about features—overbuilt versus unstable, cozy versus uncomfortable, stiff versus flexible—and brainstormed how we could stand out in the market. It became apparent that our experience in athletic shoes would be a key point of differentiation and a major advantage over the competitors.

One of countless sketches we did to outline the functions and standards MISE was built to live up to. Our primary focus from the start was to create a shoe that could keep up with all the squatting, twisting, jumping and running that inevitably happens throughout the day in a fast-paced kitchen environment.

While most shoes used in the kitchen were based on existing comfort shoes, we wanted to start from scratch by focusing on the movements and needs of those in the culinary industry. Although the typical culinary worker is standing on their feet for 12+ hours, that time is filled with constant motion—running, jumping, shuffling, pivoting—and we noted similarities to movements in sports and training that lead us to function-based design details.

As we worked through ideation, our team put together a list of several features that we believed would emphasize that the culinary industry performs at a similarly demanding level as athletes. We referenced the exaggerated, rounded-shape midsoles of basketball and tennis shoes to minimize the risk of catching edges like rubber mats while shuffling and moving laterally, an issue that causes countless ankle injuries in the industry. We took inspiration from the construction of skate shoes that offer high rubber sidewalls and a low-seated position in the shoes for stability, support, and a grounded feel. We looked to sock-like running shoes that avoid cumbersome laces that are a tripping hazard as well as a mess waiting to happen in the event of a spill. We worked on melding these attributes into a design that embodied our “mise en place” ethos. Every one of the nine parts of our shoe is considered and necessary. The boot-quality leather upper and slip-resistant TPU cupsole create an exterior shell that is water-resistant, durable, and protective. The removable algaebased EVA midsole with attached neoprene bootie was designed to allow the wearer to pull it out and spray it clean after work, swap it out between shifts for fresh support, and replace it with a new pair once worn down. Our modular construction also offers up the opportunity for different footbed shapes, levels of support and cushioning, and color and material customization for restaurants that want to stand out in a sea of black service shoes. This construction along with our minimal design became our unique selling point but would also require manufacturing partners willing to explore new ways of building shoes. After finding a partner excited to collaborate on MISE, sample creation and review would be the next hurdle affected directly by the pandemic. Supply chain and shipping delays forced processes that were typically completed in weeks to drag out to months. The biggest change in the product creation process was the inability to travel to China to work directly with the factory resources. For a project such as MISE, our team would typically travel to meet with the factory multiple times, to assess factory capabilities, 53

build new relationships, review samples, share feedback, make immediate revisions, approve constructions and quality, confirm materials and samples for production—but this new way of working meant the majority would be done via photos and Zoom.

With Testing Comes Results We reached out to Haehee Joung-Phillips—an event manager and proclaimed “chef wrangler”— to help us get in touch with some of the best chefs and restaurants in the country. After two months of reaching out and collecting applications, we selected a range of professionals with different backgrounds, identities, experience, shoe sizes, locales, and restaurant types. Wear test samples arrived in October after several delays due to material issues, COVID outbreaks, and shipping dramas that made international headlines. Our team set up a system via our website to collect wear testers’ information so we could coordinate local handoffs and out-of-state shipping. As part of receiving their shoes, we asked wear testers to sign up for weekly text surveys via a QR code included with the shoes. But as with any system, it wasn’t foolproof—QR codes weren’t scanned, text notifications were missed, surveys weren’t delivered. We worked through the kinks and were able to collect an amazing amount of feedback over a six week period. Good and bad. We committed to getting these pairs of shoes on the many people that inspired us to create 54

MISE, and it had always been our plan to listen as the wear testers discovered how the shoes worked in real time. Reviewing feedback became a weekly roller coaster ride. One minute, I’d question everything surrounding MISE because one of our wear testers said, “The bottoms of both shoes are torn apart.” The next minute, I would be listening to someone express how meaningful our brand’s goals were. As uplifting as it was to hear that someone loved their shoes and wanted to outfit their whole crew, it was just as important that we hear when our product was not meeting expectations. And it became apparent from the feedback received that we were making a solid first impression, but also found some opportunities for improvement—including a key issue with our outsole material that could have been missed if it wasn’t for our wear testers.

Preorder Prep Our launch strategy was an ongoing conversation of how to best debut our product. Accepting preorders would assist us in funding the purchase order to the factory as well as gauge market interest, but we also wanted to avoid watering down the focus we had on the culinary industry by launching on a crowdfunding site. Even though the visibility and reach of crowdfunding sites could help secure more preorders, we decided to launch via our website in order to keep our brand message pointed and clear. In support of this decision, we secured several great opportunities to tell our story—including press highlights published in local business journals and national online resources for the culinary industry. However, one opportunity was more meaningful than the rest. I received a message on Instagram from Erika Polmar, the Executive Director of the Independent Restaurant Coalition. The IRC was founded in March 2020 by a small group of chefs and restaurateurs with the singular mission to save restaurants from the devastating effects of the COVID-19 crisis. Erika offered up a partnership that would help tie together everything MISE stood for—within a week of having our first conversation, we had announced that 1% of all MISE preorder sales

would be donated to the IRC. And by the time this is published, we’ll have announced that we extended this amazing partnership with the IRC through all of 2022.

The Launch We had hoped to avoid a long waiting period for shoes to ship after placing a preorder. But with all the volatility caused to shipping, costs, and supply chain by the pandemic—something the culinary industry could relate to, as 95% of restaurants faced supply delays or shortages in 2021—delays were all but unavoidable. With all the variables considered, we chose to launch the preorder in mid-December 2021 so we could guarantee everyone could reserve their MISE for as soon as they were available. We’ve been transparent with our customers about the struggles and realities of the process, and even with deliveries slipping into summer 2022, it has overall been received with understanding and support.

The goal with MISE has always been to build a brand that spotlights and elevates culinary professionals, their crews, the food they cook, and the restaurants they run, but to also give those people an outlet to share their stories, their struggles, and their drive to elevate an industry that literally fuels everyone around them. We know that this community deserves more than just another non-slip shoe, and we believe that MISE can be more by honoring those who cultivate cuisine through passion, soul, and community. And with wear testers sending us kind words like, “Perfect for a traveling chef like myself. I love that I can spray them off and clean them before leaving the restaurant.” and “You have a very special product. Couple small tweaks and you have it,” I can assure all of the deserving members of the culinary industry, it’s going to be well worth the wait. •

IMAGE COURTESY OF AMY MINKIN FROM E ARTH

BUSINESS

Step by Step. Shoe Design and Development By Susan Ryder, Owner, Susan Ryder Design

On February 2, 1982, I walked into the Nike Research and Development building to start a career as an industrial designer. I knew nothing about shoes. I swam for exercise. Nike was an innovative force at the time—and still is. I got the job as a founding member of the newly formed Advance Concept Lab in Exeter, New Hampshire, in part, by bringing a small flashlight to my portfolio interview which took place in a dark comedy club. They liked my work, but they thought the flashlight was hilarious. Nike was the first to bring industrial design’s problem-solving methodology to the shoe design process and I loved the intersection. Now, I enjoy my work immensely as a footwear design consultant, as I have the opportunity to work on multiple aspects of shoe brand and product design. Some of my clients have only an idea, a dream and financing. With 40 years of designing shoes, I am now the “Old Shoe Dog,” and my working style is as hands on as it always has been–I still draw with a pencil and cut up samples to see how they are made! I’ll attempt to describe what I have learned in my 40 years of experience to illuminate the process for non-designers and for those who are footwear curious. Keep in mind that every project, client, resource set, timeline and scope will vary, which can impact the exact role of the designer at each phase.

The Kick-off Meeting The start of a footwear project is similar to many other design projects—the client describes goals and scope, and how the finished product will make

a difference in the marketplace. If the product is a full collection of shoes, we map out the number of styles and how they might form a coherent brand statement. We consider the consumer’s identity, their needs, expectations, and emotional connections. We choose the country of manufacture, price target, retail strategy, seasonality and timing and set sustainability goals. We answer the questions: why us? Why now? Scarlett Chase, a new footwear brand, asked me to manage design and development in 2020. The owner wanted a line of luxury women’s dress shoes as comfortable as athletic shoes. She envisioned a CEO who could walk comfortably from her Paris hotel room to her office in a pair of heels high enough to make her feel powerful and fashionable. We dug deep into this character’s shoe selection process and came up with a list of benefits she would require, some of which involved inventing new ways to construct the classic pump. The line would consist of multiple styles: boots and pumps for fall, and sandals and slides for spring, and would be offered at a price point to support the finest leathers and textiles available.

It’s a mature industry now, so how to keep fresh? Research! It is the designer’s job to keep up with advancements in manufacturing and technology that allow for design opportunities. In the last few years, a great deal of innovation has focused on sustainability, such as Knit-to-Shape uppers that produce minimal waste. Shoes are normally made of die cut pieces of leather or textile that are overlapped and stitched together flat. Machines use heat and pressure to form them into the 57

Advance Concept Lab in Exeter, New Hampshire In 1977, Nike established a research, design, and prototyping facility 3000 miles from their headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. A shuttered shoe factory in Exeter, New Hampshire became the company’s center for design, biomechanics and exercise physiology research and a sample factory. The Bio Lab did in-depth research on human athletic performance that informed shoe design. Designers were able to watch their shoes prototyped and learned the art of shoemaking from the sometimes second or third generation shoe makers. Prototypes could then go back to the Bio Lab and be tested to determine their effect on athletic performance. This arrangement produced a tight feedback loop, isolated from other essential but less risky corporate functions such as sales, finance and marketing thus unleashing designer's creativity. In the basement of that building, a five person subset group of product creators, called the Advanced Concept Group, were tasked to work on projects that required deeper research and longer term development. Tom Derderian, Founding Director of the group, says, “Design is thinking and much of that thinking is thinking out loud. In doing that, it is useful that the group be unattached to ideas and authorship. Our group, Peterson, Richard, Halbower (Fenton) and Brill (Ryder), did not get attached to an idea that needed to be politically defended. Each was an idea floating above our heads to be plucked down and examined to be used, modified, or returned to a resting place by the ceiling for a possible retrieval in the future.” 40 years later, Nike’s research and design capacity is industry leading and legendary. The LeBron James Innovation Center can make and test a shoe in an hour. The resources now are bigger and better, but the spirit of innovation is much the same.

shape of the shoe. Factories are pretty good at fitting cutting dies together tightly to maximize material usage, but there is always a pile of scraps that needs to be recycled or thrown away. Alternatively, knit uppers are made like socks, already in the shape of the shoe, and simply need to be cemented to the bottom. No extra material is required.

Getting the colors right It is important to take into account external market trends, especially when it comes to color. There are trend services that predict color and materials a few years in advance. It is up to the designer to decide to either follow these trends or to create a unique color palette. Companies may have core basic colors (browns, navy, tan, black) that are used season after season. “On-trend” colors can be saved for visual impact or for a specific trade channel. For instance, sandals may feature bright colors for the internet (because they can be seen easily), while neutral colors may apply for more conservative big box and independent retail outlets.

design for the cost intense, underfoot molded components. There are multiple designs for the less costly uppers. One bottom and four to six upper styles is common. Each style might be executed in five colors for a total of 30 shoes or Stock Keeping Units (SKU) in the collection. All have to look good on their own, tell the collection’s story, and fit within the brand.

Ideation In this phase, the designer will come up with multiple options for the shoe design. The first consideration is the shoe’s shape. The shape of the toe, the contours underfoot, and how much the shoe might cup the heel and the arch will determine the fit, style, and the shoe’s construction. The result is a plastic object called a “Last.” Look closely and you can see how the shape of a running shoe is different from that of a basketball shoe. A running shoe is made for repetitive forward movement; a basketball shoe needs to do that too, but also needs to promote lateral stability. The last on most running shoes is lifted higher in the heel for thicker cushioning while simultaneously moderating the impact of heel strike. Basketball shoes are wider to give more surface contact between the foot and the floor, thus giving traction while cutting left and right. All of those considerations go into designing the last. The second consideration is the silhouette, where the designer must consider upper patterns and the outsole/midsoles/footbeds components and embellishments. We pick the leather or textile upper materials, the lining, threads, type of padding, perf hole size, stitches per inch etc. Trends can upend design, not just with aesthetics but also with function. For a time, minimalist design like barefoot running was trending, but recently massive bottom units like Hoka One One have pushed comfort and cushioning, taking sneaker design for a 180-degree turn. In a multiple shoe collection, the design drawings are organized the way they might be merchandised. Typically, a collection has one

The Concept Comes to Life Aetrex wanted to make a line of sandals based on their market dominating footbed orthotic. Our first step was to focus on the needs of the consumer, both physically and emotionally. In this ideation, a woman with mild to moderate foot pain needed an everyday sandal. The shoe would have to fit a great many foot types and accommodate unique foot issues such as bunions and arch problems. The line would come in only one width, so the shoe would require fit flexibility from widths B to D. Since everyone’s foot shape is different and foot shape changes over the course of the day, the materials chosen for parts underfoot needed to be soft and accommodating while also providing support. We chose Polyurethane cushioning material that resists compression set (bottoming out) topped with slow compression/slow recovery memory foam to mold to the unique shape of the consumer’s foot, as well as provide that essential step-in comfort. Fashion trends are important to this consumer, and it was important to have a product that made her feel good about herself. We sculpted the shape of the sandal to be as flattering as possible, while avoiding pressure points around bunion areas and providing obvious structural support. Current trends at the time of that project involved relaxed textures and colors derived from nature, such as neutral colors and grainy 59

unvarnished leather paired with cork. We found leather suppliers with products that fit that description. Urethane molders that would be open to modifying existing techniques and combining foams. We developed unique footbed shapes to make Aetrex’s most popular orthotic into a line of great looking sandals. The line was a success with independent retailers and is still available today

Prototyping These details are sent to the sample factory in the form of a “Tech Pack.” Before Covid, most of us would travel to the factory and work with the last makers, pattern people and mold technicians to supervise the sampling process. If the shoe is relatively straight forward, you might get it in two or three revisions. If it’s not, several more are likely. Designers in large shoe companies may be shaking their heads at this last paragraph. They may have resources to skip all of this and make 3D images or 3D printed versions of their shoe concepts. This saves a lot of time and several trial rounds. All decision makers can be on board before a sample run is made. Eventually though, a wearable shoe sample must be fabricated in order to confirm fit to the foot and to ensure the shoe is tested in the intended environment.

Line Review Documentation Each product in the collection needs comprehensive specs to tell the manufacturer’s sample room how to make the sample. We document all views of each product including cross sections, make detailed drawings of anything that requires further explanation, note material sources by source, article number, and Pantone numbers, and create blueprints of anything molded. Last shapes are described. There are a number of ways to communicate the design to the factory including sketching directly on the last, Adobe Illustrator, or the use of 3D software. All specs are made in an agreed upon sample size: typically women’s 7 and men’s 9. 60

As the collection is readying for mass production, the marketing process kicks off. So far, the goal has been to get one perfect sample of each style in one color in a sample size. Once this single pair of shoes is confirmed, samples in other colors and materials are made and reviewed. A final line review will look like a table full of samples laid out the way they would be merchandised in a store. Decision makers may be marketers, sales people, other designers and developers, and the executive suite. Sometimes a company will bring in key retailers to give opinions and direction. All the work, the countless hours comes down to the designer being able to sell his or her vision. Chris Kittle, former VP of Design at Sperry Top-Sider and Cole Haan, writes, “Part of the designers’ job

is to be able to sell their ideas. They need to be able to answer the question of what is new about their design, to truly believe in it and be able to communicate it.”

Duty rates of products coming into the US vary widely. A shoe made of majority leather will cost 10% duty, while a shoe made of textile can cost over 30% duty. The design of the shoe is absolutely influenced by manufacturing adjustments and duty rates.

Pre-Production Once the extreme size trial is approved for fit, cost and aesthetics, the full-size run is graded. Patterns, gauges, proportions, material physical properties are checked for consistency across the size run. That’s generally 12 sizes for women, 13 for men, or some combination if there is unisex sizing. All molds need to be opened and approved. Designers don’t often participate in the process during pre-production unless a problem crops up.

All the critical ‘extras’ Designers are also responsible for the packaging of shoes, which is important for both shoe protection and brand identity. Logos, box graphics, printed tissue paper, how the shoe is stuffed to maintain shape in the box, and the box itself must have a consistent aesthetic.

Testing and Commercialization At this point in the process, the sampled shoe sizes are six or seven for women and size nine for men. All shoes are evaluated for fit and feel. Shoes are tested in their intended context or environment. Testers wear the shoe for about a month and report on any necessary changes. If there are issues, the designs are modified and samples are made again. Once the model is “fit & design” approved at sample size, the next step is the extreme size trial. Here the shoes are graded to a few sizes bigger and a few sizes smaller and tested again. In the meantime, the factory creates a cost breakdown sheet to ensure the shoes are within the price targets. Here we may make subtle fabrication adjustments to affect manufacturing quality and price: Changing a seam location can make a big difference in optimizing material yields and reducing waste in production.

When asked for advice by young designers, I tell them not to worship their ancestors. Understand the craft that’s been honed for hundreds of years, and then, shake it all up. This is how it’s done…for now So much has changed since 1982. Industrial designers were rare, and our problem-solving methodology was novel. Interest in learning about shoe design has mushroomed and college level courses on the subject are easy to find. I am thrilled by the energy and creativity of the new generation of designers. In particular, I am amazed to see the innovation on environmental impact and waste management. Forty years from now, I wonder what will change in the design process and how the industry will be better. •

SOCIAL IMPACT • ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Designing for a Cause. One Colorful Step at a Time By Ann Williams, Creative Director - Product Design and Project Management, & Dean Schwartz, Co-Director

We’ve always believed that emotion and purpose are at the heart and soul of great design. When we established Schwilliamz in 2003, we brought this philosophy to a broader market, tapping into what we saw as an unmet demand in the footwear industry for design and strategy consulting services beyond what the typical freelancer might offer. Rather than just draw on demand, our aim was to offer clients all the benefits and capabilities of a full-service in-house design team without the long-term commitment and expense of maintaining a full-time department. We named ourselves Schwilliamz as a somewhat tongue in cheek mashup of our surnames, aimed at conveying our unique combination of skills and experience. Before Schwilliamz, Ann graduated with an Honorary Degree in Footwear Design from DeMontfort University in Leicester, England and gained extensive footwear industry experience working in the USA and the UK. An award-winning designer with an exceptional working knowledge of all facets of the footwear industry, Ann has a demonstrated ability to manage multiple major international projects and staff. Drawing on a liberal arts degree from Colby College and a background in advertising and retail, Dean monitors market and industry trends and is actively involved in the footwear design and development process, from product, market, and consumer research and insight to material, color, and prototype specifications. It is the complementary combination of these experiences and capabilities that enables us to

meet our clients’ needs quickly and seamlessly, whether it’s to supplement an in-house design team, provide a fresh perspective, enable expansion into new categories, or oversee the entire footwear design and development process. Every so often, a design project perfectly aligns creative passion and technical skills with a deeper sense of meaning, and you realize that what drives you isn’t just professional attainment and commercial success, but also the understanding that somehow, on some scale small or large, what you do makes a difference in people’s lives. Such was the case several months into lockdown when we were contacted by Lisa Carlin. Networking led Lisa to us, via a footwear industry leader with whom we’ve worked consistently over the years. We were immediately taken by Lisa’s positivity and upbeat personality, and we were genuinely intrigued by her concept of pairing footwear with her inspirational personal story and pledge to support others with similar experiences. A few years ago, the mother of two young girls was thrown into a battle waged by 1 in 8 U.S. women: fighting breast cancer. Facing a double mastectomy, 8 doses of chemotherapy, and 6 weeks of radiation, 5 days a week, Lisa turned to an unlikely source for strength: a pair of hot pink ballet flats. Dreading the sterile hospital that she knew would become her home for several months, Lisa decided the old pair of ballets would adorn her feet every time she walked through the doors. “The bright hot pink color lifted my spirits, and always sparked conversation with other patients, nurses, and doctors. They gave 63

me the feeling that I could power through whatever was going to come my way.” This sentiment really resonated with us. As designers, it’s no doubt great to receive positive feedback on a shoe’s aesthetics or comfort, but it’s truly wonderful when you learn your work brings confidence and a smile to someone. Lisa fought and ultimately defeated breast cancer “one colorful step at a time.” She turned to us to help her create footwear that spread a feeling of empowerment and encouragement to other women fighting their fight now, just as the original pink ballet flats had done for her. The brand would be called “Poppies w/ Purpose™,” inspired by the quilt Lisa’s mother hand-stitched for her to use during treatments. The quilt was made from her great-grandmother’s “house coat” from the 1940’s, colorful fabric covered with bright poppy flowers. Continuing the theme, the brand’s tagline is “Live each day with a bit of fight and a pop of color.” Lisa had a pretty clear idea in her mind as to how she wanted the brand and shoe to look and feel, but she needed help making her vision a 64

As designers, it’s no doubt great to receive positive feedback on a shoe’s aesthetics or comfort, but it’s truly wonderful when you learn your work brings confidence and a smile to someone. reality. This project was driven by a personal, emotional story and philosophy, rather than sales numbers. With her pitch document as our jumping off point, the three of us worked together to define and design a ballet flat with a cause. As a Strategic Relationship Executive with MillerKnoll, Lisa had no footwear industry experience and needed a design partner who was not only highly creative, but also would help her navigate the arcane footwear development process and thrive in an increasingly challenging marketplace. Over the past 19 years, we’ve developed and fine-tuned a footwear design and development process that is accessible and applicable to established global brands and startups alike. In our experience, the basic framework is effectively the

same across all categories, from first walkers and casual sneakers to hiking boots and high heeled pumps, whether designed with sketch pads and pencils or rendering software. We recognize that each client is unique and that every project is different, and we tailor our process accordingly. By guiding them through clearly defined steps covering research and analysis, strategy, design and creative, prototyping and development, the client is confident that their voice and ideas are heard and understood, and, vitally, that they have a partner in whom they have confidence to make their vision and investment a reality. Understanding the many stages of footwear design and development, and navigating the nuances of the footwear industry, can be a challenge for anyone, especially those with no previous experience in the sector. To help flatten the learning curve, we have used our experience to develop a program specifically for startups. Over the course of roughly 12 weeks, we work closely with the client to define and refine their vision, ultimately yielding a complete product design tech pack ready to hand off to the client’s chosen development and sourcing partners. Equally important, the client is better informed and prepared for the full development process outlined below. Lisa participated in this program and subsequently retained us to help her work directly with her selected development partner, ICB International. On paper, at least, the overall approach is relatively straightforward, essentially following the general phases of design thinking. In practice, unsurprisingly, the devil is in the details. No doubt there are challenges with any design project. Indeed, this is in part what makes the profession so fun and interesting. All due credit to Covid, you could say we’ve been spoiled by a wealth of new variables and obstacles. With a global client base, operating seamlessly and efficiently offsite has always been a fundamental part of our business since long before WFH entered everyone’s lexicon. Until the pandemic, however, we had never undertaken a project for which all work would need to be done entirely from afar, 100% remotely. To be honest, it’s not a situation we could have even contemplated.

Further complicating the project was the unpredictability Covid brought on in the forms of backed-up suppliers, reduced access to overseas sampling, slower and less reliable shipping, and manufacturing that had nearly ground to a halt. Major global interrupters can delay a process no matter how great the team you have in place, but there are nearly always workarounds. Under any circumstances, the highly collaborative nature of the design process requires regular, focused, and purposeful communication.

Under any circumstances, the highly collaborative nature of the design process requires regular, focused, and purposeful communication. Incredibly, geography no longer called the shots; Covid meant that the tools and practices we used to collaborate successfully with clients on the other side of the globe were now equally relevant for clients just down the road. These include the usual suspects: video conferencing for real time communication, Loom and email for asynchronous communication, as well project management and collaboration tools such as Monday and Calendly. Along with relatively old school Excel spreadsheets, these tools enable us to track communications and development progress for this project and others. As always, of utmost importance are detailed briefs with clearly defined goals, objectives, timelines, and roles and responsibilities. Of course, Covid related travel restrictions ruled out meeting and working in person, so we lean heavily on remote collaboration tools to facilitate coordinating with a wide range of stakeholders, from the client to associated team members like developers, factories, sample rooms, suppliers, marketing/branding/advertising professionals and others. These tools have now become a crucial part of our footwear design and development process. Communication, transparency, shared purpose and values, and an aligned vision are a foundation of making a design process, remote or otherwise, work. Particularly in this case, as we wouldn’t even be able to meet with Lisa in person, even though she lives less than 65

20 miles away. Rather, all interaction would be virtual, taking remote collaboration to an entirely different level. Though on the surface Lisa’s project was relatively straightforward, there were countless, invisible practical factors that needed to be addressed and perfected, including the shoe’s fit, comfort, last shape, materials, and colors. Equally important, Lisa’s immensely personal story of hope, positivity, solidarity, strength, and survival would need to be incorporated into the ballet shoe. Though just a single silhouette, it needed to go through our full design and development process. The first step, analysis and discovery, is gaining a thorough and thoughtful understanding of the client’s needs and objectives. The client may provide a comprehensive design brief or we work together to detail needs and identify opportunities, determine deliverables, assign roles and responsibilities, set timelines and determine style aesthetic. By listening to the client and by asking thoughtful questions, we gain clarity on the target consumer, where and how the footwear will be marketed and sold, what white space it will fill, and what the client has done to date, if anything. The more we ascertain and establish at the onset, the smoother the overall process will be, especially given all the variables at play working across time zones and continents and language

and cultural differences. Combine these with matters beyond our control such as sampling delays, component availability and sample room capacity which are always present, further exacerbated exponentially by an unprecedented global pandemic. Once we’ve ensured we have a full grasp of the client’s and the customers’ needs, we gather and interpret the information we’ll need to design solutions in the research and strategy phase. Through market, consumer, trend, competitor, product, and materials research, we dig deep to identify opportunities and determine how best to seize them, generating success, and avoiding costly delays and mistakes down the road. In this instance, the consumer and market were clear from the outset, so our focus was on how to translate Lisa’s story and vision into a colorful and comfortable shoe. Informed and inspired, we move on to the design and creative phase: brainstorming, ideation sketching, and concepting aimed at visualizing the concept and addressing any issues identified earlier in the process. We explore options and opportunities and, where appropriate, relevant technologies. In this case, visual cues are key to the design and spirit of the Poppies w/ Purpose™ brand. These include signature details with a nod to the original inspiration of the poppies quilt, a collectable charm element and colors that jump off the page or website and bring joy and inspiration to the wearer. With

empowerment being key, motivational phases also needed to take center stage. Working on both computers and old school sketch pads, ideas and directions are explored and discussed. In regular communication with Lisa, we reviewed, revised, and refined until we had a design that captured the relative simplicity of Lisa’s original ballet shoe inspiration whilst also adding signature brand details and hidden upgrades and incorporating Lisa’s inspiring personal story. As important as styling and aesthetics, we address technical matters to ensure proper fit and superior comfort factor– so important if the wearer is not feeling 100%. Less glamorous, perhaps, but no less important are anticipating potential obstacles to ensure cost-effective sampling and production. To minimize or even avoid duties and tariffs, we pay close attention to materials, pattern cutting, outsole construction, and price.

As important as styling and aesthetics, we address technical matters to ensure proper fit and superior comfort factor– so important if the wearer is not feeling 100%. Once we were all happy with the design direction, the project moved into the prototyping and development phase. Here’s where we go from 2D to 3D, working closely with our client’s choice of development partner. This partnership allows us to ensure the footwear designs not only look and feel great, but also function as intended and can be efficiently manufactured. Our focus is on the design execution, making sure the factory correctly understands and implements the specifications and details covered in the technical packs. Liaising with development partner(s), we help troubleshoot any unanticipated issues and review and refine the samples as needed to perfect the product. The whole process concludes with a confirmation sample in our client’s hands from which they can place orders and launch their product. For every pair of shoes sold, Poppies w/ Purpose™ will donate 10% of the sale to researcHERS—an organization that funds female

scientists fighting cancer. Lisa is a proud ambassador for the New England researcHERS, raising funds for some of the country’s most exciting and accomplished female cancer researchers. This further inspired us, connecting our work, and hopefully bringing support and hope, to friends, family members and colleagues impacted by cancer. In Lisa’s words, “I fought breast cancer one colorful step at a time. And now I want to spread those feelings of empowerment, love, hope, and joy to those fighting their own fights. Cancer can rob us of many things, but the one powerful thing it cannot take away is the force of hope and unity. I want to encourage everyone to live each day with a bit of fight and a pop of color.” Despite all the pandemic-related challenges, Poppies w/ Purpose™ has made it. Scheduled to launch this summer, Poppies w/ Purpose™ will offer shoes in women’s and children’s sizes, in a rainbow of colors that match cancer ribbons, like pink for breast cancer, orange for leukemia, and navy for colon cancer. Each shoe comes with a charm, uniquely designed and locally manufactured in Pawtucket, RI, and a signature pink loop in honor of the thread loops in Lisa’s quilt and the original pink ballet flats she wore during treatment. Though the vacuum in which Covid had us all working highlighted that much of the process may have become standardized, working with Lisa has reminded us that good design is never plug and play; it’s far more than just a step in an efficient, streamlined process. Effective design keeps unquantifiable, subjective human elements, such as purpose and emotions, top of mind. If there’s even a small silver lining to a global lockdown, perhaps it’s that we were able to in a sense compartmentalize and separate logistics from creative, so that the latter doesn’t get lost in the mix. We’ve been reminded that the footwear we design is much more than something to wear to work (or WFH as case may be) or play or dance in. With some heart and soul, and a pair of hot pink ballet slippers, Lisa has done just that. And we’re proud to have played a small role. •

Classic Leather Digital Archive Story Tile, authored by Stephanie Schaff

BUSINESS

How to build a future-ready product archive. By Erin Narloch, Founder & Consultant, PastForward Head of Web3, Enwoven

Background & The Challenge When I joined Reebok in the summer of 2016, their archive project was already underway. The project had transformed from taking place in a single office room in an outbuilding with an archive consisting of only ten shoes, to an expansive space in a then sprawling suburban Boston campus. The archive team consisted of two parttime temporary staff members who had graduated from their previous intern roles and one intern. They sat on a holding of confirmation samples, historic pieces, advertisements, documents, and ephemera. This collection held incredible potential; it became my role to unleash it. The term “brand archive” in this article references a brand’s physical product archives, especially ones that are utilized throughout the seasonal design process. Brand Archives can comprise a variety of physical assets, documents, catalogs, commercials, products, ephemera, advertisements, design drawings, and more. Archives are important in cracking the “Viewing Vacuum,” a term widely utilized within the cultural sector, which refers to viewing an object today without its context, inherent historic material culture, value, or use. So why was Reebok interested in creating a brand archive? If done successfully, Reebok, its employees (past and present), brand partners, media outlets, sneakerheads, and fans could tell stories, build products, and create marketing strategies and activations in a more authentic way, leading to increase brand awareness and confidence.

The question remained: How do you build and position an archive to hold and grow brand value in an increasingly iterative, digital minutia-laden world? These are the steps we took at Reebok to position its product archive for the future.

The Reebok Archive Design Process: Lean in with curiosity During my first months, I set forth a plan, beginning with researching the intranet’s organizational charts and identifying key stakeholders and decision makers. The individuals represented the brand’s activities, general managers of key business units and leadership within marketing, product, design, creative direction, and legal departments. Once I outlined a set of individuals, I set up meetings with each of them. As a researcher at heart, I sifted through the online organizational charts and acquainted myself with who I could meet. When I met with them, I’d ask a set of standardized questions: Do you utilize the archive today? If so, how? How could we support your workflows & processes? What would a successful archive look like to you? Is there anything about Reebok’s past that you’d like to know more about? In many cases, I was met with the “I don’t know,” even from individuals like the senior director of marketing for the heritage product line. I immediately followed up with more openended questions such as, “Can you tell me more about how your team creates marketing briefs?” In the moment, I’d often make suggestions as 69

to how the archive could provide a value-add to the process, such as “Do you think it would be helpful if the archive team provided examples of historic advertisements that took on either the same product, creative angle, or target audience?” I’d also write down all of the words and acronyms I wasn’t familiar with to learn later. I knew to “fit in,” I needed to adopt the corporate lingo.

I also outlined what would be possible with a full-time permanent team: how we could divide and conquer and become even more knowledgeable and a greater-asset for the brand over time. Professionalizing the archive required an investment from the brand that delivered new support, expertise, and results.

Present a clear ROI By the fall of 2016, I’d gathered enough evidence from my informational chats with stakeholders, observations of the working archive team, and insight into the brand’s future plans to present the business case for an official archive and team. I presented a proposal to my manager, VP of Reebok Futures, and HR. I clearly outlined the department’s mission, vision, goals, and a team structure. Roles covered the major activities of the brand, footwear and packaging, apparel and accessories, and documents and advertisements. Team responsibilities were to dive-deep in their respective collections and become authorities on them. I led brand-level storytelling initiatives and projects. I positioned the archive as a brand-wide service provider, with a team of subject matter experts to support the major activities of the brand: • Creative direction and design through research and seasonal curations • Product Creation through research, curated visits, and collaboration kick-off meetings • Marketing and Communications through research and support of creative briefs and in-market activations • Legal through ongoing research and evidence production, from litigation and trademark and copyright research • HR & Onboarding through visits and specific onboarding of new employees and leaders 70

Erin Narloch, presenting research on the running boom of the 1970s and the aeorbics boom of the 1980s.

Utilize business initiatives The Archive benefited from two key business initiatives and events. In the fall of 2016, one initiative provided the budget for the archive to pilot digital storytelling with Enwoven, a Silicon Valley tech startup with New York Times backing. Investing in a digital storytelling platform was transformative for the archive. It provided the opportunity to tell stories to a global community, educate, engage, and shine a light on processes, little-known campaigns, and share the firstperson narratives of previous designers, innovators, and the founder of Reebok. Each story was penned by the archive team, so visitors to the site had the benefit of hearing from the experts directly. By 2018, we launched SSO for the global organization, removing a barrier to entry.

Another key initiative of Reebok and our then parent company, Adidas, was moving operations from suburbia to the up-and-coming area of Boston’s Seaport. This was an immense move, during which the archive received unimaginable benefits. These benefits included donations, as individuals cleaned out their desks and workspaces. We developed an intake form that controlled the process and made it feel more secure. Designing an archive space in the new building was exhilarating. We worked directly with Gensler, discussing how we envisioned our future working space. The key aspects of the build included a meeting room framed with large panes of glass, where we could meet with employees, collaborators, even VIP visitors as well as present changing exhibitions (which complimented current milestones within the business). Beyond the meeting room, we had a large window into the archive that provided passersby an inside view into the always curious space of the physical archive. We now had a physical archive with humidity and temperature control, high-density mobile storage, and working spaces for each Archive team member. This space is centrally located between the product organization and creative direction, proving to be corporate real estate gold.

Subject Matter Expert Authors Senior Archive Specialists, Holly Roberge and Stephanie Schaff share their perspectives on the stories they penned for the organization. Holly: “The Vector Jacket” authenticates the apparel silhouette as a true Reebok icon as it provides contextual evidence of its birth, evolution, and on-trend iterations over the last three decades, and solidifies its place in history.” Reebok Outdoor is a truly collaborative story shaped from cross-department archive collections (apparel, footwear, 2D, & video) and valuable insights from an original designer’s account, mood boards, and design drawings.

Photoshoot of Steve Jones's 1985 World Record holding shoes (signed).

Democratize knowledge As an archive team, we worked diligently to share what we knew and what we discovered and to respond to requests. This process helped to build community, trust, and a broad investment from Reebok. Over time, the digital archive became a global hub of activity: an onboarding tool, research tool, and the first line of inquest for many. The concept of democratizing knowledge didn’t end with the Reebok community; over the course of five years, the archive showed up in numerous marketing activities of the brand, including in pop-up exhibitions spanning the US, Europe, and Asia, inspiring messaging and marketing campaigns globally and in-market, and contributing to the re-launch of the Reebok Human Rights Award in 2020-2021. The power of the archive became tangible because it was shared, not hidden away.

Contextualize Content As mentioned before, the archive fights against the “Viewing Vacuum.” Within sneaker history, the archival process represented an opportunity to dig deeper and research the cultural implications of the time, a shoe’s commercial success, community adoption, or even material usage. Within the archive we worked hard to contextualize the collection’s holdings through outside experts, experiences that intersected with the 71

collection, and secondary sources at the time. The value of a shoe’s context is found in both its commercial and cultural significance over time.

was when the archive was included in hosting global virtual onboarding and lunch and learns; we utilized Microsoft Teams to record sessions, and the infrastructure provided by the digital archive allowed us to represent stories already in existence on the platform. Having access to resident experts in the archive meant the space and its contents could be used to suppport business initiatives, it doesn’t mean others needed to be an expert to visit or find value in the archive. Key to its success, we didn’t layer in academic language, but rather considered the most inclusive ways to story tell. Thanks to my experience in early meetings, I researched and integrated the language of the business throughout my time with the archive. Personally, I use the phrase, “where memory meets imagination to fuel the future” to describe the archive. This notation epitomizes my approach to brand archives: it’s a nexus, where past, present, and future exchange with one another, and where colleagues and creatives find inspiration and confidence. It’s here in the in-between, time is suspended, and insight is found. This is the magic of brand archives, a future-proof approach to the dynamic exchange of the real, authentic, and not yet realized. And this is the reason I firmly believe brand archives will be even more significant in the future.

Top: Reebok Outdoor Digital Archive Story Tile. Bottom: The Vector Jacket Digital Archive Story Tile, authored by Holly Roberge

Digital-first mindset Thinking digitally in the archive created a shorter runway to success. Scanning, photography, web-based collections management, and the digital archive tool placed much of our focus on how the research and knowledge we held could be shared digitally. This mindset meant that when COVID hit, we went remote, we were positioned to support our colleagues and requests without missing a beat. A great example of this 72

Erin Narloch, working behind the scenes on a photoshoot during COVID lock-down

Van Doren Rubber Company. Custom women's shoes, c. 1973. Vans Archive.

The Impact Over the course of two and a half years (2016 – 2019), the Reebok Archive went from being housed in an outbuilding, to being centrally located and accessed by the product, design, marketing, creative direction, legal, and other departments. The Archive traveled from the periphery to a participant in the product creation process. The impact of the Reebok Archive is challenging to succinctly articulate. but it can easily be experienced in in the community it builds, the knowledge it shares, and the product and storytelling it reinforces. While Reebok has a long heritage to draw upon– since 1895!-- it’s the living brand archive that keeps it dynamic, active, and tangible. I led Reebok’s Brand Archive for over five years; before that I spent two years at the adidas Brand Archive, and before that, over a decade in museums and cultural institutions. And while I’ve spent much of my career studying the past, it’s the

Catherine Acosta, Product Archivist and Historian, Vans 73

application of this knowledge into the future I’m most excited about. I moved on from Reebok in January 2022 to step into the future. I’m heading up the newly created Web3 practice at Enwoven, because I’m convinced there’s power in the medium’s future, especially for brands. The metaverse offers a direct to consumer communication channel that values dialogue in lieu of one-way pushes, calls for authentic storytelling, and encourages creativity. Other brand archivists and historians feel similarly about the space’s opportunities, like Catherine Acosta, product archivist and historian for Vans. Catherine noted, “Product archives and historical content in general will hold a special place within the metaverse because of their symbolic representations of past ideas and stories. The metaverse has the potential to emphasize the complex meanings of objects and the various things they represent to different people and cultures. Recontextualizing history and archives in this way, would not just allow history or historical content to encompass “the facts” but also the interpretation(s) of history itself—a meta-approach that can integrate micro and macro thinking, and allow for imaginative and creative relationships to develop to the past.” Vanessa Ayer, Senior Image Specialist, Kohler Co., sees the benefits of Web 3 for product archives while also calling attention to the mindfulness needed around ownership and copyright laws in this emerging space. Vanessa explained, “The future of NFT’s can be great for product archives. NFT’s can be used to document the history of a company while also creating a connection with consumers— also giving them an opportunity to “own” a

Opposite Page: Trade cards, like this one, were a 19th-century form of business cards, but they were also considered a collectible. Levi Strauss & Co. printed up a series of trade cards showing miners, engineers, and other consumers wearing famous riveted clothing. These were given to store owners who then gave them to their customers when they bought a pair of Levi's® overalls or other garments. Many people pasted the cards into scrapbooks or traded them, much like baseball and other cards today. OR Levi Strauss & Co. 1890s Trade Card

piece of history. However, brands would need to be mindful of ownership and copyright laws.” Tonya Blazio-Licorish, Archives Content Developer, PMC errs on the side of optimistic caution when it comes to Web 3: “As exciting as this technology is (and not exactly new), I believe brand (product) archives can be beneficial in expounding product history and reengaging through a more exciting UX/UI experience. But should be careful in this space, especially with this new technology as a marketing tool for brands it’s still very much quality over quantity.” Tracey Panek, Historian, and Director, Levi Strauss & Co Archives framed up her excitement through a recent application of technology at Levi’s. “One thing that excites me in my role as the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives Director is how to apply new digital technologies to our collection. We recently finished our first 3-D scanning project in the archives, capturing amazing images of five of our late 1800s Levi’s jeans that are nearly 150 years old. The detail is amazing, from the denim wear and fit to design details like the pocket stitching, but in a dimensionality we haven’t had before. I’ve been thinking of the myriad of potential uses—online exhibitions, design showrooms, in-house sample creation, or NFTs. I love the thought of blending history, design, and technology to inspire and excite new audiences. It opens a whole new world of possibilities!” Regardless of where you sit as it relates to product archives, or the metaverse, this revolution is happening all around us in real time. I encourage you to invest in documenting your institution’s knowledge (think: product archive and IP on chain) and not to do so only to look back, but rather to boldly march into the future. When the real and authentic are transparently secured on the blockchain, we can collectively tell stories, share value, and engage in a new frontier for communication, extending a brand’s reach and meaning into the metaverse. See you in the future. •

ENTREPENEURSHIP

Endstate Sneakers | Collaborations | Community By Stephanie Howard & Bennett Collen, Co-founders of Endstate In 2007, Kanye West began collaborating with Nike on his signature sneaker: the Air Yeezy. A cultural saga marked by radio show drama, never before seen hype, and billion dollar clashes would ensue, ultimately resulting in West’s rebuke of the Swoosh. Throughout 2008, West was spotted rocking Air Yeezy 1’s, his celebrity friends were all given prototypes, and before long, the release of Nike Air Yeezy 1 became one of the most anticipated fashion releases of all time. As the sneaker rolled out, first in the “Zen Gray” colorway, then the “Black/Pink,” and finally the “Net” colorscheme, each release sold out instantly. The sneakers commanded $2,000+ on the secondary market (after a pedestrian $215 retail price tag), and soon after, fans began begging for the next installment: the Nike Air Yeezy 2. After a development and prototype period shrouded in mystery and hype, Nike officially announced the new silhouette in May of 2012; however, that is also when reports of West’s dissatisfaction with Nike, specifically regarding their refusal to grant him royalty rights on Air Yeezy sales, began to come out as well. In a now classic interview with The Breakfast Club in early 2013, West proclaimed that not even he knew when his “Red October’’ Air Yeezy 2’s would hit shelves. By December of the same year, the relationship between West and Nike had soured. He told Hot 97’s Angie Martinez, “I just might have taken the new Nike deal because I just loved Nike so much, but the new me with a daughter takes the Adidas deal because I have royalties and I have to provide for my family.”

The Nike Air Yeezy collaboration had almost everything going for it: favorable brand positioning, West’s historic music career and rabid fanbase, and unprecedented early success. Despite all of this, after just two silhouettes over four years, the partnership crumbled because of Nike’s refusal to grant West additional financial and creative control.

Endstate is opening a door for these entrepreneurs to get their own signature shoe that fairly distributes value to them. By combining physical sneakers and NFTs, the smart contract behind it all delivers royalties from the original sale as well as every subsequent resale. Adidas then offered West exactly that, and the rest is sneaker history. The Yeezy brand was most recently valued between $4 - $5 billion. That happened to Kanye West: a superstar. Imagine how hard it is for a majority of artists, athletes, and entertainers to even take part in the lucrative and coveted space of sneaker design, much less negotiate financial and creative control. Only 4% of the 450 NBA athletes have their own signature shoe. A tiny fraction of musicians and artists get to that top tier where a sneaker brand has interest in designing a shoe for them. A new breed of entrepreneur exists today with engaged fan bases, but they are not invited to the signature sneaker deal conversation at a time when sneakers are the fashion item to signal one’s self expression. 77

René Magritte’s Son of Man, is not interchangeable with any other painting in the world. If you were to trade it for a different painting, you’d have just that: something completely different (and likely less valuable).

The Future of Product Ownership Primer on blockchain and NFTs A blockchain is a digital ledger that is distributed amongst a network of computers. This distributed structure achieves several key digital innovations including transparency, immutability, and decentralization. A blockchain can store any type of information including cryptocurrency transactions, decentralized financial contracts, or, most important to this conversation, token ownership. A token is a provably scarce digital asset that exists on a blockchain. NFT stands for non-fungible token. Nonfungible simply means that something is unique. For example, a $1 bill is fungible because every $1 bill holds the same value and is completely interchangeable. A one-of-a-kind piece of art, let’s say 78

Artists, creators, and athletes are looking for ways to engage their audiences beyond the unfriendly confines of social media. At the same time, their fans are eager to engage with them in more meaningful ways than likes and comments. At Endstate, we asked, “What if these creators could engage through one of the most coveted product categories there is?” In today’s culture, that product is sneakers. When combined with NFTs, sneakers are a perfect medium for creators to build deeper connections with their audience. At Endstate, we’re creating the future of product ownership by marrying physical and digital products, and distributing the value created by these products more fairly. Starting

with sneakers, we work at the intersection of collaborations and NFTs, partnering with creators to bring their stories to life by making both a physical product to wear and a corresponding digital twin in the form of an NFT. Endstate is able to collaborate with a much larger universe of creators because of our unique business model founded upon NFTs. Endstate sells NFTs first and then only creates the exact quantity, in the exact sizes, needed. This, in combination with our high quality, US-based manufacturing operation, means Endstate is able to release sneaker collections in a bespoke, small-batch manner. Furthermore, this process also enables Endstate to avoid the environmental issues accompanied with excess inventory.

Why NFTs? Through NFTs, creators can sell artwork, goods, experiences, creations, and moments directly to fans. Creators can also earn royalties on secondary sales of their work, taking away the sting of selling their work “early,” only to see it appreciated significantly in subsequent sales. For example, if an artist sold a particular piece for $250, and two years later the piece sold for $2,500,000, the artist typically wouldn’t see a dime of the price appreciation. Through the enforcement of royalties on secondary sales of an NFT, creators can lock in permanent participation in the appreciation of their work like never before in history.

Through the enforcement of royalties on secondary sales of an NFT, creators can lock in permanent participation in the appreciation of their work like never before in history. Sneaker collaborations aren’t immune from this phenomenon. Only the most elite tier of creators can fully participate in the upside of a collaboration if the sneaker is a big hit. Kanye West’s aforementioned collaborations with Nike and Adidas is the perfect example of both the ridiculously high standard for a person to earn a signature sneaker and the compensation and credit issues they still run into despite

their influence. Even then, of course, these elite creators and artists only benefit from the primary sale of the sneaker. If a sneaker collaboration starts selling for a premium the second it hits the market (as many tend to do) the collaborator doesn’t see any of the upside of the secondary sale…until now. Endstate’s model changes that by leveraging a key feature of blockchain technology and NFTs: the ability for creators to collect royalties in perpetuity. NFT royalties offer a creator a percentage of the sale price each time their NFT is sold. These royalty payments are perpetual and automatic because they’re executed by smart contracts on the blockchain. A standard royalty on each sale is 5-10% of the purchase price, representing an automatic revenue stream never before available to creators.

Bridging Digital & Physical NFTs represent an exciting evolution in asset ownership in digital environments, but equally exciting is their potential to bridge the digital and the physical. At Endstate, we’re selecting creators and athletes who have powerful stories to share through this medium. By tethering NFTs to physical sneakers, NFT owners have a permanent, immutable certificate of ownership for their sneakers, containing all of the relevant information about that pair—but that’s just the beginning. Owning an Endstate NFT unlocks unique benefits. Each collection that is released will have different rights and experiences associated with the NFT based on the collaborator’s interests and ideas. For example, there are options for: • Community building: like access to a private discord channel to communicate with the collaborator and share in the community of their fans • Access to events: an NFT can act as a ticket or a back-stage-pass • Access to products: NFT holders may get access to products not offered on the open market

• Collecting: Sneakerheads like to collect exclusive drops. Now they can collect the NFT and the physical sneakers. • Digital integrations: wearing sneakers in the metaverse and other online environments. Communities of fans can come together with individual ownership of these unique drops. What we are creating is less of a “brand-toconsumer” relationship and more of a shared community engagement with each collaboration.

Making Physical Sneakers in the US For the physical product, we are making the sneakers for our first drop in the United States with U.S. and imported materials. The soles are molded in Massachusetts.The uppers are knitted and the shoes are assembled in California. It is complex to do, but we are committed to this innovation and to the people who are making our products. We’ve made great strides in a short time frame towards our goal of using only local materials. Knitting is also unique in that it is more materially efficient than traditional methods of manufacture (meaning there is less waste of materials). We will continue to push boundaries in manufacturing utilizing new technologies to build products that are as advanced physically as they are digitally.

Drop 0 Endstate’s first drop was on November 12th 2021 and included a set of limited edition NFTs and sneakers, which sold out right away. The NFTs were minted on Solana, a blockchain platform known for its fast processing ability and low transaction fees, and were sold on the FTX US marketplace, a leading US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange. Drop 0 debuted the 00:Predawn, a bold silhouette boasting the story of Endstate’s genesis. We believe that the expansion of digital technology in our lives is a net positive. Design of Drop 0 was inspired by all of the exciting opportunities we see from innovations in the digital realm beginning with the 00:Predawn existing in two states: physical and digital. 80

We think that digital technologies are in many ways knitting the world together. This resulted in the 00:Predawn upper featuring a bitmap, or pixelated image, of a topographical world map. The knit design was programmed to visualize the textures of the map in a subtle, abstracted way, with a different part of the map featuring on the left and right shoes. The shoe design is split down the centerline, with the lacing off to one side. This asymmetry highlights each pair’s existence in two states (physical and digital). The military-grade sole is made in the United States by Vibram, one of the most respected sole manufacturers in the world, providing comfort, performance, and an enduring foundation on which we can build. The premium insole provides energy return, cushioning, and impact absorption. The NFTs of the 00:Predawn show a 3D rendering of the shoe staged in a surrealist environment inspired by the evolution of digital technology and the human experience. The environment was created in collaboration with both human artists and artificial intelligence (AI). The artists give thought and direction to the AI, which then takes the artwork to new places that we couldn’t achieve on our own. We’re embracing these digital tools because we believe that they can help unify the global community and create new experiences. All holders of Drop 0 NFTs have access to a private Discord server with the Endstate founders and team. There, NFT holders are able to give input on future designs, drops, and integrations,

and see sneak peeks of designs and upcoming collaborations. Our “State Change” events are where NFT holders have the ability to redeem their NFT for their physical pair of sneakers.

Charitable Drops Charitable giving is foundational to Endstate’s mission. As a web3-native brand, Endstate is uniquely qualified and positioned to take action during times of crisis because of our ability to move quickly, energize and engage our community, and allocate funds in a publicly auditable manner. Cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain infrastructure bring an added level of transparency and efficiency to the world of international fundraising. Ushering in this new paradigm for charitable giving is a primary focus for Endstate. To this end, in March 2022, Endstate launched an NFT collection in support of the people of Ukraine with 100% of the profits being donated to humanitarian relief efforts. The “Ukraine Aid” sneakers come in both digital and physical form. The colors of the Ukrainian flag adorn the upper, and the word “мир,” meaning “peace” in Ukrainian, is written across the medial side of each shoe. Endstate is proud to live at the intersection of the sneakerhead and web3 communities. Two global factions that champion progress, generosity, and an individual’s right to express themselves. We plan on rallying these dedicated and impactful communities to come together in support of charities around the world with the help of collaborators.

Future Drops As the name implies, Drop 0 is just the beginning for Endstate. Forthcoming drops will feature collaborators and the designs we co-create with them to tell their stories. Leveraging knit technology, we’re able to create unique design effects for each collaborator, yielding a true signature shoe. Our second drop that we did in collaboration with a popular NFT project just sold out. Beyond that, we’ve circled some of the top talent across sports, sneakers, gaming, music, art, fashion, and social creators as potential collaborators and will be working to bring their visions to life in new and compelling ways.

The Evolution of Digital Ownership We all value our time and interactions in the physical world as well as digital spaces. The founders of Endstate believe it is important to make products that are ownable in both. We talk about our brand as representing The Future of Product Ownership because this is all evolving to an end state where we own products in real life and in digital environments. The decentralized online ecosystem (which is known as web3), where the next generation of physical and digital assets will live, is built on top of blockchains, and is providing the infrastructure for ownership of digital assets that hadn’t existed before, when only a few large companies owned assets on the internet. It’s an exciting time for creators and consumers alike. •

Thank You Supporters. DESIGN IMPACT SOCIETY TRANSFORMATIONAL IMPACT

EDUCATIONAL IMPACT

Matt Rightmire

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FOUNDATIONS & GRANTS Barr Foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies Boston Cultural Council Boston Society of Architects Foundation Cambridge Community Foundation Klarman Family Foundation Lovett-Woodsum Family Foundation The Malka Fund Massachusetts Cultural Council National Endowment for the Arts Oregon Community Foundation Regional Arts & Cultural Council Sappi: Ideas that Matter 83

COUNCIL Meghan Allen Jonathan Anderson Judith Anderson Kyla Astley Joe Baldwin Corinne Barthelemy Leah Ben-Ami Scott Berkun Aidan Borer Debra Brodsky Tracy Brower Amy Bucher Alfred Byun Megan Campbell Jess Charlap Lisa deBettencourt José Dos Santos Sarah Drew Lewis Epstein Jessica Finch Renae Geraci Adam Gesuero Ross Guntert Sara Hartmann Ryann Hoffman Lauren Jezienicki Jessica Klay Emily Klein David Lemus Patrice Martin 84

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