Staple

Photo: Andy Mueller

LAKAI » Staple

∴ Released back in 2001, the Staple was an immediate team favorite and a very prominent shoe of Lakai’s beginnings as a footwear brand. It is one of Mike Carroll’s favorite Lakai models to ever exist – He was a big reason why we brought it back into the Spring 16 line.

The idea was to bring the shoe back in a new form, not to just re-release the same shoe with all matching construction and details. Create some sort of unique interpretation of what the shoe once was.

This of course, brought on the challenge of – What will it be? Will it be vulcanized? How can we achieve the look of cut and buff if it is vulcanized? Should we make a slim cup sole version? Lot’s of ideas were getting thrown around and of course, a lot of challenges in terms of manufacturing capabilities.

The original staple from 2001. A cut and buff midsole with a fairly inflated upper.

Preliminary Concepts

Concept # 1

>> The first idea was to construct the shoe as a cold cement wrap. The tape colored in blue would be a standard vulcanized tape that would act as an inner foxing. The more detailed outer tape, with varying heights and edges, would then be wrapped around the shoe to create this cut and buff look. This method ended up not being a possibility within our current manufacturing capabilities – we had to think it over.

Concept # 2

>> The second idea was to create a vulcanized version where the foxing tapes would mimic the aesthetic of the original Staple. After sketching some ideas down, this seemed very possible in the likes of both design and assembly. From here, it was the fine tuning stage.

Rendering of vulcanized concept

Initial Colorways

>> The initial color ways were inspired by Marc Johnson, Rick Howard and Mike Carroll. This made perfect sense as they were the guys skating the original Staples back in 2001. We thought of a cool way to highlight the inspired by story and made a graphic that resembled a name tag with each respective signature colored in red.