For 18 plus years of being a sneaker artist I always had the dream of having my own shoe with my name on it. But in that dream I had always envisioned it would be with an existing brand. Adding my art to an existing model, that’s what I’ve always done. It’s how I built my name and ultimately a career. For years friends and colleagues have asked me when is the Mache shoe coming and I never took them seriously because I saw myself as an artist, not a designer. But why not do both? After all this time, so many accomplishments, so many bucket list moments, I just knew it was time to evolve. I wanted a new challenge. I seriously had never thought about doing my own shoe, until now.
Enter the Mache Runner. When I decided it was time to take the leap and design my own shoe from scratch I knew it had to be something that checked all of the boxes in what I always look for in a shoe. A great silhouette and shape, premium materials, design lines that flow together, and they have to be COMFY. To meet that need a Vibram tooling was a must. Vibram is the standard for comfort, traction and stability. Once I decided on the tooling it was time to create the shape. Being heavily influenced by running shoe all my life I knew the direction I wanted to go with my runner. I wanted to create dimension with layers but also keep it clean and simple. Sounds like quite the contradiction doesn’t it? With that being said I believe with my runner I achieved just that, a walking contradiction.
Creating a visually appealing shoe is one thing but giving a shoe a story and substance is a whole other exciting challenge. When me and my wife sat down to think of a narrative for my shoe she suggested travel, not travel in general but travel in the United States. We always look to Europe and other beautiful locations in other countries but tend to forget there are some great places in the USA as well. So with the colorways of the Mache Runner we wanted to shed some light on some cool places and things that can be found in the USA that have inspired us in some sort of way, and hopefully they will with you as well.
With each shoe we also created coordinating apparel pieces to accompany each colorway.
The Centralia collection will be available for preorder for 72 hours on 8/28 starting at 11am.
As the great Bart Scott once said “CAN’T WAIT”. See you Friday.