I enrolled myself into footwear design because I had my kicks with the sports, sportswear, and the sports footwear well since seventh grade. I used to be a quarterback in my high school team at my University campus. Loved Nikes. For me, it wasn’t just shoes. It was Nikes because of the innovation and the ingenious designs they always did. It wasn’t affordable for me because Nikes were so premium and I didn’t have that much money back then. So I’ve always wanted those sports shoes.
It was something I desired. I saw that all my friends had it and I was also into drawing so I put the two together – design, art, and shoes. It wasn’t until I went to college (Rhode Island School of Design) that I kind of forgot about it…
All because I didn’t think it would ever happen. But then industrial design came up as a major option for me and on one of the presentation slides they actually had a shoe on there. I was like, “Ok, I’m going back to my initial dream”.
It was an inspired decision. As I finished my football “career” at the high school, and during the time I started working at Nike I spent a lot of time with former basketball players… Also, there are only two kinds of sports shoes that I love the most: running shoes and basketball shoes, so it’s great it worked out that way.
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