While we are still waiting for all the emails to trickle in for the PENSOLE x Future of Footwear Competition we had a chance to catch up with Johnny Nguyen  from the kids category. Johnny was challenged with designing a kids shoe for Skechers that actually TAUGHT kids something. Thats a pretty lofty task considering I don't even think kids exist anymore (there was only one group of kids that showed up at my house last night trick-or-treating for Halloween). Check out Johnny's design and some sweet photography of the  sample below!

I heard about it through my good friend Marcellus Johnson, who was in Futuresole and the Pensole x Adidas class. I was actually trying for the Adidas one but the deadline snuck up on me... Luckily Future of Footwear was right around the corner.

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I was looking for something challenging and refreshing. It got kind of stale doing furniture day after day, and I needed a change of pace. I wanted to learn the ins and outs of footwear design, but it was a personal goal to find myself on the opposite side of the country -definitely out of my comfort zone, doing something I've never done before. Safe to say I had no idea what to expect out of Pensole.

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I hopefully was able to offer a different perspective and insight in some cases, coming from an art and product design background.

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Dwayne really opened my eyes to design, on the first day actually. It's not about pretty pictures, but insight and innovation, and this applies to every industry. Footwear design originally in my head was just cool shoes... Now it's cool shoes, smart thinking, pure creativity, and most importantly, an opportunity to help someone. I think that's motivation enough!

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It was like the weirdest Christmas morning... I mean I still can't believe I have a production quality prototype. It's crazy to me still.

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The brief was to design a shoe that helped children learn, and what they learned was completely up to me. I went through the crazy ideas really early, trying to find an issue to solve. How do I teach kids without slapping facts on a shoe? I found a shoe related issue about a week in; learning how to tie them. What most people don't realize is that shoe tying is still considered a milestone achievement by parents, one of the moments where children will develop confidence in doing things on their own. This wasn't happening until an older age now, and that might be because of distractions like video games, or decreasing attention spans, or... velcro shoes.

Since the shoe was supposed to cost about $35 dollars I knew I had little room to add to it, so I removed instead -the perforations allow them to lace however they want. I set out to make the learning process as easy and fun as possible, and developed the idea of a companion iPad app that helped the kid master tying and lacing.

I must have had luck on my side to get all the way to Vegas (the competition was tough). I did know that if I could at least communicate the story, I would be on more fair playing ground.

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That would be ideal, but the design needs some major tweaking before that happens!

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I hope to improve on everything Dwayne and fellow classmates helped teach me, and hopefully compete again. I'm still new to footwear design and forever thankful for the doors that have been opened up. Now it's up to me to choose one of those doors.

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Team Foreigners FTW!! No but seriously thanks for having me!

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