Here's What Happened When a Menswear Forum Designed a Sneaker
Imagine you were tasked with inventing the perfect sneaker. You might borrow the bubble of a Nike Air Max, or copy the perfectly pitched wedge silhouette from the Adidas Samba. Add some quotation marks from Off-White and glue on an extra sole to make it more like a Triple S, and presto-chango: You’ve got a dope shoe!
This sort of Franken-hype monster was exactly what Archibald London wanted to avoid when they set out to design the perfect sneaker. So they asked the pickiest guys on the internet to help them get it right.
For the past year, Archibald London has been developing a new sneaker with the aid of Styleforum, and this week they released it to the public for pre-order. Since August of 2019, the most hallowed amateur council in American menswear has been painstakingly reviewing every design detail to create the perfect sneakers. The exact length of the vamp, the correct number of lace holes. Styleforum was founded by Fok-Yan Leung in the aughts as an early bastion of #menswear. It has since morphed into its own incredibly fastidious fashion subculture, a place where men post their selfies on what looks like Web 1.0 message boards for the edification of their peers, followed by bruising rounds of comments about the exact width of the poster’s lapels. Leung rejects the term “nerds.” He calls his users “product obsessives.”
The object of this obsession is called the SF-01: hand-stitched by Italian artisans and offered in a rainbow of antiqued calfskin and suedes. When I first heard about these shoes, I felt a familiar tingle in my PayPal account, but when I finally saw the product shots, that urge to cop turned to bemusement. To create this shoe, Archibald compiled hundreds of Styleforum user comments, extracted 16,000 data points from a detailed survey, and went through multiple rounds of samples. The end result is a sneaker that’s sleek and minimally branded. It is also strikingly similar to the Common Projects Achilles Low, the shoe that kicked off the luxury-sneaker boom in the first place.
How had so much time and effort produced something that was nearly identical to a sneaker we all know so well? Was this just an algorithm giving the people what it thought they wanted? Was this in fact what they wanted? Or was this shoe truly, if imperceptibly, better than its competitors? Clearly, many people had thought long and hard about this. How had they come to this decision?
Archibald London is a strange example of a larger burgeoning trend in menswear. When I spoke to founder and CEO Rohan Dhir, he called the company “luxe direct-to-consumer.” His mission, like that of so many of his DTC peers, is: “True craftsmanship, direct connections, no middlemen.” That claim doesn’t quite ring true—customers are still using a go-between to get their products, just without the wholesale, marketing, and brick-and-mortar-retail costs that drive up prices on most luxury goods. But just as Everlane does for basics and Daniel Wellington does for watches, Archibald shows customers a full breakdown of their costs with transparent pricing, and then passes those “savings” on to their customer.
Most of these businesses focus on one product category: denim at Gustin or cashmere at Nadaam. But Archibald has broader ambitions. The company sells shoes, clothing, leather goods, linens, knives, copper pots and pans, and, soon, olive oil. But initially, Archibald was born in 2014 after Dhir heard a talk from Warby Parker cofounder Neil Blumenthal in business school and decided to get in on the direct-to-consumer action. Intent on starting up his own cheap and trendy glasses brand, Dhir traveled to China but was disappointed by the quality of the products. A friend suggested he try making glasses in Japan. Of course, the price point would be higher than the $99 glasses Warby Parker was offering, but it would still be way less expensive than luxury brands like Oliver Peoples or Moscot. Perhaps there was an opening in the middle? From glasses, they moved on to hand-stitched dress shoes, and from dress shoes, they found their way to sneakers.
But the marketplace has been flooded with similar brands producing similarly minimal sneakers at low prices, and online they all sort of look the same. Dhir decided the best way to sell his uber-sneaker was to get the buy-in of the world’s most demanding jawnz enthusiasts. If these men were satisfied, then others would be too. “We wanted to put an end to the debate in this already overly saturated space,” Dhir said via email. “Who needs another white sneaker, right?”
In Dhir’s mind, the key was separating the real from the fake. “We want them to know that it's not another Italian shoe made in the La Marche region, which has become a very industrialized thing,” he explained. “Lots of brands are saying, ‘Handmade in Italy with the finest Italian calfskin, without middleman,’ and it’s become almost a standard script used on social media now.”
But what I hadn’t considered is that quality—or a shoe that looks like no other—might not be the driving force here. Instead it might be better to think about the Archibald x Styleforum project as a demonstration of how a brand can collaborate directly with a community of consumers, and thereby create a built-in customer base for what might otherwise be a risky launch. So many other online brands are making something they think people will like and want to buy; but with their Styleforum collaboration, Archibald is betting that they know what their customers want. There might be a smaller pool of customers, but if you can get those people to tell you exactly what kind of shoe they’re looking for—to basically design the shoe for you and then commit to ordering it—then you’ve got a business.
However, the strength of this idea is also its greatest weakness. Because this was Archibald’s first time soliciting so much input, they created an online survey for Styleforum members to fill out, and about 1,260 self-appointed aficionados answered the call. This is where they got those 16,000 points of data, along with strange discrepancies that made the surveys difficult to interpret.
Based on all this feedback, now sorted and organized, they created a sample shoe, released the photos, and got another round of comments, many of them brutally exacting. There were special requests for colors, materials (calfskin vs. kangaroo), sizing info, plus more rounds of iterations and refinements.
And then came the deluge of questions directed at Dhir.
“I actually received one call I'd never forget through our WhatsApp channel,” Dhir recalled. “A member of the forum explained that he doesn't wear socks and instead rubs cocoa butter on his feet and wears shoes, so he asked if the cocoa butter reacts well with the kangaroo leather.”
Dhir tried to answer each question as thoroughly as possible in order to give his clients the best customer service, but he was also just intrigued by the sheer granularity of the responses he received. “Some of the questions went into such minute detail about how it wears in different weather conditions, etc., and it was crazy to see so much thought go into the purchasing decision—it revealed literally every question a person would have.” When his collaborators finally slip their feet into Archibald’s shoes after all the work that went into them, Dhir believes customers can feel it. “Everything about this is superior,” he said. “The uppers are the ones Brunello Cucinelli uses!”
At this point, I was ready to see the shoes for myself. When I received a sample pair of SF-01s for the purposes of this article and unboxed them, I had to admit that I was impressed. They truly do seem nicer than most of the pseudo-minimalist sneakers out there, though whether they are so much nicer remains to be seen. (Build quality is best judged over time, and I haven’t had long with these shoes.) Mine came in a mustard suede, with a thick but removable insole, a fully lined leather interior, and a cushioned but not overplump collar. They’re casual but sharp enough to wear anywhere—the kind of shoe I could see Larry David sporting in the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
They are a luxury version of a very familiar design that has already been tweaked and optimized to reach a Platonic ideal by many brands before Archibald. What’s curious is the way Archibald went about redesigning them, essentially handing over creative control to a group of menswear maniacs on the internet. Obviously, giant fashion brands like Nike have been doing marketing research for years, and this is in part how they make their decisions about new releases. But smaller brands have generally had to take a shot in the dark. Maybe this is a model other brands (beyond sneakers) can replicate, by not just catering to customers but inviting them to collaborate.
You might walk away thinking that when it comes to design, the wisdom of crowds isn’t worth much—since they usually wind up making what they already know, or some kind of chimera worth far less than the sum of its parts. But I’m hopeful that Archibald’s approach heralds a whole new way for smaller brands to cultivate customers and develop a product perfectly suited to their needs. As of press time, Dhir says initial orders have been even larger than expected—but he’s sure there will be more things to fix with the SF-02s.
Originally Appeared on GQ
