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HS: On the flipside, with the way people discover shoes now, on the Internet versus in stores, if it isn’t a Nike profile, the good is lost in some cases. You can obviously see it. Sneakers are picked apart like never before, but people still have blinders. For example, an RS-100 has a great profile.
BJ: It’s funny, because when Puma asked me about doing that shoe, I didn’t know what it was. I’d seen the RS-100 but wasn’t too familiar with it. Adam, Air Rev, at Puma said, “Look this is the shoe you’re going to work with, it’s pretty cool and I think it will hold up well with the art work. There are a bunch of panels to play around and work with.” When I saw the shoe, just the cad file, I couldn’t work it out in my head but he then sent me one shoe to work with, and it was cool. That was the first project I worked on. If I did it now, I’d have approached it much differently. But, he wanted it look old school and traditional tattoo, That is why the colors are tannish and similar to a skin.
HS: That also made sense for the season, but tattooing was also coming into play more in the fashion scene then as well.
BJ: With the Adidas, it takes a while. It’s a year from initial design through 1st and 2nd samples to the eventual project. It might take a year from when they first see your artwork, so obviously you’ll see things you want to change. Not that it’s bad, but it’s like seeing homework you did a few years ago. Hopefully, though, you’ve progressed and you’ll want to have made it better. I don’t tattoo like I did 10 years ago, natural progression. With the Adidas, I’m working with Chris Law, C Law, who I’ve known through Crooked. The Adidas stuff I’ve done is for Adidas skate. There are two shoes, four t-shirts, and a jacket. Since he and I have worked together on the Addict stuff and the New Balance stuff for Crooked, he knows how I want my stuff to look. I can send him my files, and I know it’ll be cool when he works with it. I know it’s going to be right. That is why I enjoy working with him so much. With this stuff I can tell him that it needs to be a certain way, and he’ll go to bat for me with Adidas. It’s weird, at all the companies, there is a certain budget for a shoe. An Air Max 95, the budget might be $18 a shoe and it needs to everything to fit under that. Red stitching might cost 12 cents, black might be 10 cents. And it can add up. It was getting that way with the Adidas project, nickel and diming, but Chris can say, “You asked BJ to do the artwork, so you’ve got to keep it.” He went to bat, and they ended up changing little things you’d never notice to get the cost right. It might be a subtle change in color. Or material. The average person would never know. And, it doesn’t affect the overall project. The procedure lets you learn so much. Even working with New Balance, New Balance UK...
HS: You did just the boxes for those?
BJ: I did one of the shoes, the 575, but it was weird because it looked really close to a general release version.
HS: Is that the black and yellow?
BJ: Black and blue, the black and yellow is a 577. Cole did a 991. The black and green one. Charlie did a black and infrared looking one, and I did the 575. When we did it, we wanted to have a black sword theme, with stories behind each shoe, and that’s what the paintings on the boxes are about. I went over to the factory four or five times, and just seeing how it works and how they put the shit together is dope. Women stitching by hand. That’s why I love New Balance. The quality control. They don’t have a quota each day, they don’t need to make 1,000 shoes before they can go home. They work their allotted time. Then they go home.
HS: It was cool they celebrated the people that work there.
BJ: Absolutely, 100 years they’ve made shoes. The things that didn’t make it are really minimal in terms of what’s wrong. Even Puma doesn’t have really bad b-grades. Not noticeably as bad as a Nike b-grade. New Balance is real cool. With cost on that, we were working with UK cost. That is why it was so expensive.
HS: Sure, people don’t always understand how cost works. Especially when it comes to how some of the collaborations get done.
BJ: A lot of people don’t know the process. People will always say I would have done this, this, and this. But Nike, for example, approaches and says these are your materials and this is your cost, make it work. And, if your some guy surfing the ‘net, you can easily say, “Oh, that new Undftd shoe looks like shit, I would have done this different.” No, you wouldn’t have. You would have used what they did, because those are the options. Things I didn’t know either, until I started working with the companies.
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