A sneaker designer shares how a passion for shoes led to connecting with a Taiwanese manufacturer named Mr. Johnson and flying to Taiwan to bring digital designs into production during the dial-up internet era.
Chapters
I started designing shoes. I really love shoes. I have a lot of shoes because I enjoyed designing shoes. So I started designing some cool sneakers. I did it on my computer, and then it got to a point I showed it to some friends. They're like, why don't you bring this to life? Why don't you manufacture these things? I'm like, I don't know how to do that. So I started digging all over to find You know, how I can make these shoes, how I can bring them from the computer into reality. And those were days of, you know, dial-up internet. There was nothing. Alibaba was very almost nonexistent at that time. So I was digging through the internet. I finally found some guy, Mr. Johnson, that agreed to help me out. So he says, well, but I'm based in Taiwan. If you want us to work together, you have to fly here. So I'm like, okay, let's do it. I flew all the way to Taiwan to go meet Mr. Johnson, and I showed him my designs and everything, and he really loved this, and we started developing this thing together.