This summer, 30 young students from all the around the world have come together in Portland, Oregon, determined to change the footwear game by embarking in the PENSOLE World Sneaker Championship. Assigned to teams and representing a diverse range of brands, boutiques and major corporations across the industry, they’ve began their journey to design a product that’s ready for retail. These are their stories.
TEAM ADIDAS
Roster: Dexter Sulit, Claudia Lopez, Daniel Raes and Marcus Taylor (CMF)
Today was mostly a work day. We were tasked with narrowing down our ideas and refining them. Now is when we start giving the bells and whistles a spin. It’s very easy to go overboard with a design but it’s actually encouraged. You just keep pushing your ideas until they get out of hand and then you take those same ideas and tone them down. We are also in the stage where tape ups are important. A tape up is when you use masking tape and tape a shoe or last. This helps so that you can draw on the form of a shoe and see how it would look in three dimensions. I had a long conversation with the photographer from Sports Illustrated about the future of digital drawing and potentially drawing on a digital last. I think this would be a great advancement and would save a lot of time and confusion in the design process. I also spent much of the day going back and forth with classmates trying to help solve each other’s design problems. The great thing about Pensole is that you aren’t designing alone. Every project has a piece of every student and designer that gave feedback. Each design is a collective of thoughts and ideas of some of the most talented shoe sketching people. That’s a beautiful thing if you think about it. Here we are trying to find out who is the World Sneaker Champion and no one is competing against each other. We are merely striving to get the best out of ourselves and help those around us do the same.
Here’s a tape up from Team Adidas member Claudia Here’s another from Team Under Armour’s Satoshi And here’s a group of tape ups including Team Adidas member Dexter’s sand runner on the left
