Trend reports, market reads, and a point of view your team can act on — before the AI noise does the deciding for you.
Nobody publishes a working designer's trend report for footwear. This one is written by someone who has to stand behind the calls in a line review — and then get them made. Macro and cultural currents, translated into what your category should do about them.
Each report has a next step — the consultation that turns direction into your direction.
The flagship. Seasonal, category-spanning, free to request — the fastest way to see how I think before we ever talk.
Palette, material, and finish direction with Pantone families and sourcing targets — packaged for internal buy-in, branded to survive the meeting after the meeting.
The report, pointed at your line: a working session plus a written breakdown of what the season's currents mean for your consumer, your price points, your factories.
Four positions that shape every audit, roadmap, and design review I sit in.
AI has made concept output free, and it all looks great — that's the trap. Teams sit in design reviews drowning in beautiful images, last week's ideas disposable by Wednesday, and nobody in the room asking the only questions that matter: can we make it, at cost, through our actual vendors, and will anyone buy it twice?
Between the deck and the shelf sits a canyon, and most of those ideas end up at the bottom of it. The fix isn't less AI — it's a human who has been to the factories. My favorite diagnostic question for a product team is still the simplest one: have you ever been to your factories? If the answer is no, your pipeline isn't de-risked. It's decorated.
I use AI every day, and I'm not nostalgic about it. But there's a difference between driving and being driven. My work starts as original drawing — and the tools amplify it into photoreal product where every line still matches the sketch. I'm not backward-engineering AI output into a portfolio. I'm authoring, then amplifying.
The teams that struggle aren't the ones using AI — they're the ones consumed by it: infinite generation, zero conviction, ideas that stopped meaning anything because there's always another hundred behind them. Part of the modern creative director's job is addiction management — knowing when the exploration is making the brand brighter, and when it's just making the team busier.
The shoes people love are not accidents. Run the proportions on a classic silhouette and the golden ratio shows up more often than chance allows — the same relationships that make a sunflower, a colonnade, or the human form read as right. I'm building this into an owned framework — a design-equity system that scores form the way merchandising scores margin.
Footwear is the discipline that mastered the human body in motion — waterproofing, comfort, durability, fit, and an entire global supply chain built to serve it. That knowledge doesn't stop at shoes. It's exactly what robotics needs next.
I've already advised a robotics team on their machine's exterior: instead of inventing materials from scratch, de-risk it by leveraging the footwear industry — textiles, knits, testing methods, and vendors that have already solved abrasion, weather, and wear. And the design question runs deeper than durability: a robot with human-scaled proportion and familiar, footwear-like forms reads as approachable; a stump of servos reads as a threat. Empathetic design will decide which machines people accept into their homes and workplaces.
Bring your product ambitions, business challenges, and unanswered questions. Together, we’ll explore the opportunities and strategies that can move your business forward.
Connect Now →