Tommy Ogara

HS: A friend of mine recently went to Thailand and found a copy of a sneaker he’d done for Puma. He said he felt like he’d finally made it.

Tommy: It’s kind of funny isn’t it. We have an international queries section on our US website, and a kid emailed us and told us that the Clot he got didn’t quite match up to the other Midnight Special he had. It clicked to us that there was a fake. I have a guy named Martin who works with us Hong Kong, and he found that the fake had come out of Canton. The fact that we had been copied in Canton after someone bought an official pair in Hong Kong is kind of crazy. When we first found out, we were like this sucks. I emailed Edison, who was like “fuck, how’d this happen.” At the end, we just let it go. It’s the first time though, I guess it will happen again.

HS: As you move from drinks to an idea for a collaboration, how do you balance the way a frame is designed to the collaborative look is conceived?

Tommy: Generally, we’ll have a theme to work with, a direction. For example, with Neighborhood, we knew we wanted a wrap. But, we wanted it to look different enough so that it fit the Asian market and was a neighborhood look. You take the frame, and it doesn’t look right. For an Asian kid, the pinched corners really work. When I started the design, some people said “whoa, are you sure you want to pinch those corners?” I designed shapes and sent it to Neighborhood. I’d already done the Visvim. And used Some vintage plastics that I picked up.

We make all our own plastics. We don’t use anything off the rack. I work on all the plastics and laminates. I found all these vintage plastics. There’s different layers in creating collaborations. It is kind of like batting back and forth. Sometimes I do the design work, sometimes it is done in LA. We often finish it up with designers out there. When it comes to putting product on your face, the specs are really tight. Especially for the Asian market. So we often do the design work after the people we’re working with give us the vibe. We’ve never had a really bad experience working because most of the people we collaborate with are friends. It is important to make sure the end product does look like what the brand is offering. We retain the rights for sale on most of them as well.

You’ve seen the Nomad and the Pursuit?

HS: Yeah.

Tommy: That’s another design that won’t work well for white guys. At the same time I was creating these bone colored plastics. It’s like playing catch, that’s kind of what it is in developing these products. I like it. When you are doing design work, you are basically working for a market or a client anyway. The trick is it has to look Dita too, and retain a Dita vibe. But with Pursuit, Shima and the boys really tweaked it and I think it is really rad.

It’s interesting, I’ve always been fascinated with the process. You have an idea. You draw it on paper. Now, after drawing we bring it to the computer. We get a 3-D cad drawing. We choose plastics or create parts. You get a prototype and think wow, great, or we need to change. The process is what I love. Whenever we design, we still get really excited about prototypes. We are always designing a year to a year and a half ahead. Developing technology and designing ahead. Not having a middle man means we can work with engineers and develop new technologies. We have new frames coming out, the Galore and the Copious, they have some technology that took us a year and a half to get. But, that is worth it. When you are independent you can do what you want, you are not satisfying some suits. That’s a good thing.

Collaboration, like you said, does drive the Asian market. But, it is a process and at the end of the day it is about people. Somebody has an idea, somebody draws it. It is communicated by design to the factory. A prototyper makes it. They send it to us, we show it to them. The process makes the product. Then at the end of the day people put it on their face.

It is a weird thing collaboration.