New Balance Is Making the World’s Greatest Skate Shoes
You don’t need to hold a subscription to Thrasher Magazine or understand the difference between an ollie and a nollie to know that New Balance's Numeric skate line is having one hell of a year.
The decade-old New Balance skateboarding sub-brand has released countless robut sneakers since the beginning of 2024 that not only do the job they were designed to do (i.e. help its wearer land a kick-flip), but they look the part, too.
Take NB Numeric’s Dunk-like 480, for instance, a shoe first released in 2023 that has all the features of a traditional skate sneaker (puffy tongue and a chunky midsole), but following a few tweaks to the upper and a handful of stellar-looking colorways back in January, it's also now damn good-looking.
Let NB’s most recent collaboration alongside San Francisco-based artist Jeremy Fish and 303 Boards act as an exemplary case in point.
After all, New Balance skate shoes are made for more than just dropping the odd Caballerial down your local skate park. NB skate sneakers are also geared towards the thousands of non-skating customers out there, too.
Yup, news alert: NB Numeric is for everyone. Who'd have known?!
Last month NB Numeric served up a twisted take on the 440, a low-profile sneaker with lineage tracing back to the brand’s heritage of classic running shoes from the early 1970s.
But instead of merely re-releasing the shoe in a new colorway (which, of course, wouldn’t have been a problem), New Balance retooled the entire upper to replicate that of the New Balance 990, a popular lifestyle sneaker series.
Turning fashion-centric sneakers into bonafide skate-ready shoes is actually becoming a regular occurrence for NB Numeric, which also re-released the 574 Vulc back in March.
Inspired by New Balance’s 574, a sneaker initially debuted back in 1988, NB Numeric’s Vulc version saw the traditional upper fused with a skate-ready vulcanized rubber outsole. The result? A robust but very wearable skate shoe.
New Balance’s Numeric skate line, though, isn’t all about reworking the classics.
NB Numeric’s Brazilian team skateboarder, Tiago Lemos, has been designing his own line of NB skate sneakers since 2020. While the likes of Brandon Westgate, Tom Knox, and Franky Villani, all of whom are also NB-sponsored skaters, have had success trying their hand at their own signature NB shoes, too.
Hell, even Jaden Smith has released wearable skate-like New Balance shoes in partnership with his MSFTSrep label, although it’s worth noting that these were with NB’s mainline as opposed to Numeric.
The beauty of New Balance Numeric compared to other skate shoe-making brands on the market is undoubtedly its originality.
Despite already boasting such an extensive back catalog of skate shoes, New Balance Numeric is still only a little over a decade old.
While this means that the brand doesn't have the same storied prestige in the world of skateboarding that the likes of Vans and Carhartt do, for example, it does mean that NB Numeric can keep its styles looking fresh without a vision blurred by the pastiche of yesteryear’s icons.
