It’s easy to assume that large brands have the resources and infrastructure to simply do whatever they want when they want. Believe it or not, that is not always the case and more often than not big brands call on little guys such as myself for a helping hand.

I tell people all the time I don’t consider myself a sneaker head and I’m definitely not a skater but if you work within the streetwear community or your just a fan of streetwear culture it’s tough to ignore the explosion of growth that Supreme has experienced over the last 10+ years.

If you have been following the Kicks Factory IG over the last year or so every now and then you will see those classic all red Supreme slides pop up on my feed from time to time. If you haven’t figured it out I’m the dude that made them. Please allow me to explain:

In 2013, I was contracted by supreme to develop this idea they had for a slide. Until this point in time supreme has only done collaborations with shoe company’s which means they never had to worry about developing there shoe samples because they were collaborating with brands who had there own shoe factorys and sample rooms.

To my knowledge this was there first time really developing and producing there own footwear product from A to Z. So If that’s the case then it’s safe to assume they probably don’t have an in house footwear developer to manage this project, and that’s were I come in.

Once I got this project I realized pretty quickly how big this could be. Before we started they sent me a drawing and then we went over the timelines, deadlines and goals. I had 8 months to develop the final confirmation samples for the black and red slides and to complete 10,000 pairs for production (5k Black/5k Red). The goal was that we would ship 2000 pairs to London, 2000 pairs to Tokyo and split the last 6000 between Los Angeles and NYC of which 400 pairs or so would be for editorial purposes (Hypebeast, Complex and others), and giveaways to friends and family.

8 months sounds like plenty of enough time to develop a slide...how hard can that be? There just slides you say. Think again! Supreme really liked the classic Adidas 3 stripe slide and that was the base they wanted to use. So they shipped to my office about 12 pairs all in different sizes so we could measure the Last size for each pair. This technique is used when attempting to create your own sizing. Sizing in footwear is a very complicated process and it’s just simply easier to copy someone else’s. This is an example of the “invisible stuff” you don’t see when shoes are being made that can save a brand tens of thousand of dollars in the long run.

Supreme was very clear that they did not want a Velcro or leather strap and they wanted it to be clean with no stitches, so I suggested to them we make a custom TPU strap mould which is a great option. The whole time they were concerned about there customers and delivering something different which I can respect.

TPU moulds are great options however they are expensive and because we are making many different sizes this also means there needs to be a strap mould per size to accommodate the total amount of sizes. In addition to the strap mould we also created a custom outsole and that also required 1 mould pair per size. In the end supreme spent well over $50,000 in tooling cost on this 1 time product release. Crazy!!!

If you look at the outsole of the sandal there is repeat pattern of stars. Supreme wanted those stars to be as small as possible but we continued to run into the issue of air bubbles in the stars that was almost impossible to eliminate without increasing the size of the pattern. The simple way to put it is when your pressure injecting a pasty like material into a large mould that has tons of small “nooks” within it, that material is not going to fill every nook. So we corrected it a few times and after explaining this over and over again to supreme we finally came to a compromise once they realized that getting the star pattern 100% filled was not possible.

I mentioned previously that the strap was TPU moulded. The straps would come out as sheets in one color then the supreme logo would be computer painted in white. TPU could not be moulded in two colors at that time ( I say at that time because the technology is always evolving). The strap would be laser cut then cemented to the outsole and the Last would be inserted to give it the perfect shape.

It wouldn’t be fare to tell this story without addressing a small issue with the sandals post production. For those who purchased the slides and experienced a separation issue with the strap, this was because of the lining material we were asked to add to the strap that were against adding. There was a “felt like” material that was added to the underside of the strap that we were not in love with but we did as we were told and this is what led to some of the separation issues that many customers experienced. It was definitely unfortunate but these things do happen sometimes. I think supreme handled it well and we still had a successful launch of the product. All 10,000 pairs sold out in less 30 minutes world wide on —-date—- and the rest is history. Maybe they will want to do a re-release in the future, we’ll see. 😉

It was a pleasure to work on such a prestigious project although it was not easy and I’ve learned over my last 15 years in this business that theses are the type of projects that make you better, faster and stronger.