FOOTWEAR JOBS and the 3 places that sneakers take us
Hi friends,
In the history books of our future children, there needs to be a full-page spread on sneaker culture.
Sneakers take us to the real physical places of our daily lives.
Sneakers promise to take us to the places our heroes go. When we put on Nike high-tops, we feel like we too can perhaps go on to score 32,292 points in the NBA — you may know this as the plot of the 2002 film Like Mike.
Sneakers take us home. In 2005, Nike put a pigeon on the SB Dunk Low, and New Yorkers fell for a product that elevated their squawky, hardy citybird into coolness and desirability and art. For the city of Chicago, all you have to do is paint it red and black.
There is no other fashion object capable of combining, in one design, the love we have for all three of those places — of explaining, in a single high-top, both who we are and where we want to go. This is why sneakers are so ineffably cool.
This week, companies in the business of footwear:
StockX runs a sneaker reseller market.
The sneaker market runs on artificial scarcity. Producers drop shoes in limited batches, which means that shoes typically appreciate in value after purchase. One particular pair of 2011 Back to the Future II-inspired sneakers, for example, launched for $179 and now go for $10,000. The aforementioned pigeon shoe has an ask price of nearly $20,000. StockX formalizes this market: it’s a platform through which anyone can buy, sell, and track the value of shoes. The website is something like a validation of the worth that sneakerheads believed in all along — even moderate portfolios run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. StockX also has the advantage of a bird’s eye view: their platform captures horizontal market data on shoe preferences and trends that producers like Nike may not have access to.
StockX is hiring sneaker authenticators, product managers, and much more.
Adbusters produces the “most earth-friendly shoe in the world.”
Adbusters is a Canadian nonprofit that describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.” They are primarily known as a magazine that refuses to fund itself via advertising in an effort to challenge the revenue dynamics of the media industry. Recently, though, they decided to take their anti-capitalist talents to footwear, and what resulted was the Blackspot Antiswoosher. These shoes are union made from 100% organic hemp and recycled car tires, and they come with a designated “sweet spot for kicking corporate ass.” This is a shoe meant to undo the shoe industry — even the name of the design is a subtweet at Nike.
Adbusters is looking for web developers, interns, and volunteers.
Highsnobiety is the media company for the sneaker industry.
When I first started writing this edition of 4CJ, I kept coming back to the way that shoes often look ridiculous but feel just right. These new VaporMax, for example, look like a casual impression of the Pompidou…but they’re cool? Our canonical Yeezy’s are literally coarse socks. And chunky filas feel like a horrible throwback to the 1990s, but maybe they are perfect for us — 2019 also feels, in a way, like relieving a past nightmare we’re too good for. In sum, shoe designers bring us a world of strange and surprising options. Highsnobiety is our goldilocks, taste-testing the industry to see what’s too hot and what’s too cold and what’s just right. They review the latest releases in footwear and fashion, from Lacoste’s recent modern revival of “tennis vibes” to Burbery’s summer 2019 “flex” on the black canvas high-top.
Highsnobiety is hiring a photographer, a data analyst, and more.
Allbirds represent the growing direct-to-consumer trend in footwear.
Allbirds are the merino wool shoes that have found their way into the sneaker-consciousness of 20-somethings despite being mainly neutral colored and unbranded. You’ve seen them! As a company, their mission is simple — they want to make a shoe that’s comfortable and cleanly-designed — but there is appeal to this sort of focus. By cutting out distributors and retailers, the company has breathing room to fight for small, meaningful, industry-leading changes. In 2019, for example, they decided to go fully carbon-neutral, and they have a history of committing to design modifications with sustainability impact (water-bottle shoelaces, recycled packaging, etc).
Allbirds is hiring a UX designer, a sustainability analyst, and more.
Footnotes:
more background on the political history of the sneaker industry
if you didn’t last week, check out Such a Pitch, a stellar newsletter about tech + entrepreneurship written by two female investors in LA
last week, 4CJ made an exciting appearance in DC Inno
Julio Torres explaining his favorite shapes is 21st century required reading
Love,
Lea