Ex Nike Designer Launches New Brand
It was January 2017, I had just graduated design school and took a job designing emails, social media and website visuals for a small fragrance company. They made me come into an office with terrible fluorescent lighting and cubicles. I hated it. I was being told what to make by middle aged white ladies who never left their hometown.
I developed a dream, I wanted to become a sneaker designer at Nike. So I spent every day at work sketching sneaker designs on post-it notes. Spent every evening learning how to render sneaker designs like the professionals, took more design classes at FIT, created a ton of design concepts. I applied to nike over a hundred times, applied to adidas. Nothing. I continued to work in corporate, moving on to an advertising agency where I got to design and direct creative projects for huge global companies.
About 5 years had gone by and a part of me never let go of that dream. One day on whim I decided to look at the Nike career page and apply for a role leading global digital advertising for Converse. It wasn't exactly the sneaker design role I wanted, but I figured it was close enough and perhaps I could one day move into designing sneakers if I made the right connections.
I ended up getting that job off the strength of my portfolio and continued to work at Nike for three years. It was interesting, working at nike was nothing like I thought it would be, I thought it would be the pinnacle of my career, I thought opportunities would flow to me as easy as water in a river, I thought people would be warm, welcoming and encouraging. What I found was quite the opposite. I had spent years trying to get access to this opportunity, trying to become apart of this club that seemed like the highest achievement.
Ten years had gone by and I still hadn't produced a single sneaker, I found myself sitting in a meeting room one morning and sketched this last design on the whiteboard, then it hit me. I had waited ten years for a single opportunity to be a sneaker designer, just waited, and I hated that. In my heart I knew I already had the capability, I had in fact designed many. So why don't I actually just pursue producing my own sneakers under my own brand instead of pursuing being someone else's designer.
It wasn't easy, manufacturing sneakers has always been an expensive undertaking, A few years had gone by and I talked with a few manufacturers but no one could quite get my design right, then I discovered Zellerfeld and everything changed. I was able to get my sneaker produced exactly the way i wanted with this exciting new technology. you could imagine the joy in my heart after seeing my first sneaker produced, wearable, and true to my name as a designer.
This is my brand, Star Scraper, and this design is the first out of many to come. I hope you enjoy my story and what I'm creating. Because my design language is futuristic, I'm exploring a sci-fi concept for the brand. Let me know what you think.