Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got your foot in the door at Reebok.
I majored in Industrial Design in college, it’s a pretty broad major and it wasn’t until my senior year that I got into footwear design. Coming out of school I worked as a machinist and a welder to save money while I worked on my footwear portfolio and applied for jobs. About a year after I had graduated, I finally got a call back from Reebok to take on a temp position organizing materials. My first week I found a footwear designer to mentor me; we would stay late, and he’d give me fake projects and let me help with some of his work. I designed my first real sneaker for Reebok in my final month as a temp before getting hired as a Footwear Design Apprentice on a team called Technical Style. Quickly after that I was hired on as a full-time Footwear Designer. At this time, I was leaving the office at normal hours, but I would go home and handmake my own designs for fashion shows for brands of friends of mine, molding the bottoms, stitching and lasting the uppers – I wanted to work in the fashion space specifically. Reebok had a fashion team, but they didn’t have their own designer. Anastasia Franquillo, the creator of that team, gave me a project after discovering my interest in the space. She stole me away to be the designer for Reebok’s Pinnacle Runway product and I’ve been doing it ever since.
It was an easy decision to work on the Premier Road Modern when the opportunity was given to us. Can you share a little background towards the story of how this silhouette came to life for you?
At the time our team was pushing to enter the 2000s running space, no one really knew it would become as big as it did, but we were geeking out over the Y2K Premier Running line in Reebok’s archive. When we got the green light, we started pulling all of our favorite models from the archive and gathering a library of all of our favorite details. I pitched this idea of a sneaker designed as though the Premier Running line had never ended. The real spark happened one night when I was taking apart a sample we had of the bring-back of the Premier Road Plus. I cut out the vamp and tongue and placed them on top of the shoe, it looked so aggressive, and it amplified the silhouette perfectly. That led to the tongue, heel, and vamp all being these exaggerated molded foam pieces. For the rest of the upper we had this idea to consolidate all of the complex layers, textures, and material executions of these 2000s running sneakers into a single process. Efficiency felt contemporary. The factory team was not happy when I suggested making the entire shoe a flow-molded TPU sitting on two textiles, they said no one had ever asked them to do that. After drawing a bunch of iterations, reviewing with the team, and landing on the perfect lines for the shoe, I created a very extensive tech pack for the factory, and four rounds of revisions later we had the Premier Road Modern.
Apart from silhouettes of the past, is there anything in particular that’s influenced your design process?
I think there’s always a narrative going on behind my designs that isn’t necessarily as apparent to everyone as it is to me, and that’s intentional but I do hope people can feel it in some ways. It usually comes from taking these stories of our archive or a brand we’re collaborating with and obscuring them into a sort of fantastical space. Even Premier Road Modern is from a world where bulky 2000s running shoes remained the peak of running performance. I like to look towards narrative mediums for inspiration like film, books, and video games way more than I look to footwear or even fashion.
Similar to the Premier Road Modern, a lot of products within your portfolio share generously sized proportions and sharp looks. Is there a particular reason for that?
I like exaggeration, finding a good balance between fun and sophisticated. Maybe it’s a product of trying to tell stories with footwear, it’s a limited canvas so everything needs to be purposeful and loud in a way. The silhouette is really important to me and is always where I start, I like to have the shape feel like it has a stance to it. Whether that’s an appearance of leaning forward or backwards or putting a lot of visual weight in one spot, it ends up leading me towards specific proportions that can be seen throughout a lot of my designs.
The category of Y2K runners and silhouettes inspired by the era is quite crowded at the moment. What differentiates the Premier Road Modern from what’s currently trending to you?
The obscure space the idea came from is what separates it. It’s more referential than it is an homage to Y2K shoes. The Y2K trend is a really fun one and I’m glad it blew up the way it did. This sneaker, more than most within the trend, is about pushing the aesthetics from that time period into a new space rather than celebrating them as they were.
