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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)
I once heard a quote that said, “You have to want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe.” You have to work so hard that you forget to eat. You have to set your phone down and let your friends and family know that you’ll get back to them when you have achieved your goals. If you want to be successful you have to be willing to give up sleep because if you go to sleep you might miss the opportunity to be successful. You have to seek the knowledge you need and never stop learning. You have to be willing to quit your job, sell your possessions and fly to Portland for a four-week opportunity at Pensole.
Each classmate of mine has given up something to get here and that’s the easy part. We show up to class early, stay late, eat when we can, and sleep on occasion. We sketch until there is an indent in our fingers and then put our pencils down to pick up markers. We pause shortly to refocus our blurry vision and then work away in front of the illuminated computer screens. We don’t do it for money or even shoes. We do it because it’s what we love to do and who we want to be. You can try and stop us from reaching our goals but we won’t forget where we are headed. If ever our faith wavers an inspiring designer walks into the room and puts our fears to rest. One such designer came in yesterday after our sleepless night and rekindled our fire.
E Scott, a recently retired Nike veteran, came in on a whim yesterday to provide food for thought. The thing about E is that he is one of the most passionate people I’ve ever met. You never know when he’s going to show up but after he leaves you’re almost certainly going to grab a pencil and get back to work with a fresh new perspective. He tells vivid stories of design projects at Nike and is so humble that he says that WE are the inspiration. He is retired now but his passion isn’t gone. He transferred that footwear design spark to new projects and proceeded to tell us about an animated story he is working on. Some other classmates and I listened to him talk for almost an hour about this project and after he left we knew that he was the kind of person we want to be.
If any of you out there want to be a footwear designer, or anything else for that matter, don’t be afraid to get out there and do it. Forget your possessions, tell your friends and family you’ll be back soon, and work until you can do what you love for the rest of your life.
The studio wasn’t pretty after the all-nighter Sunday. Here is my final shoe but it is only one amongst 24 extremely well thought out designs by Pensole students. Here’s E Scott inspiring students in a way that only he is capable of.
