Why a sneaker blog?

I’ve been blogging about sneakers for about five years now, first with freshnessmag.com and now on a dedicated sneakers-only blog, sneakernews.com. I wanted to do 24-hour news blog strictly on sneakers.

Are you surprised at how successful it’s been?

In the past five years since starting Freshness, I’ve helped build two other successful blogs: nitrolicious.com, a very successful ladies trends blog run by Wendy L, and Nike’s first-ever blog, inside.nikebasketball.com. I’ve learned a lot from building the three sites and watching them grow. Starting Sneaker News, I applied all that I learned on the three and was able to grow the site quickly.

Are you making a good living off the blog?

Yes. We also have a team of nine paid bloggers that work on Freshness and Sneaker News.

What’s the most rewarding part? Besides the money.

The most rewarding thing about running the two blogs is being a great source to our readers. It’s extremely cool to know that we have readers all over the world.

It seems like everyone’s always trying to swoop everyone, but how do you actually swoop the competition?

We try very hard to be original, so we spend a great deal of time producing our own content. Sometimes we don’t get to a story first, but our goal is to get a story up with rich content and straight facts. We shop a lot, we read a lot, and we also email a lot for the stories we do.

What are your five favorite shoes? Do you have a holy grail?

Air Max 1 Atmos Safari, Air Max 1 Kid Robot, Air Max 90 iD Infrared Patent, Air Jordan III Cool Grey, Hyperdunk! I’ve never really been into Nike SBs, but I’ve always wanted all the first series Dunk SBs. I guess that’s my grail.

Least favorite five, or most overrated.

I like all shoes but won’t wear Shox, Dunks, or most lifestyle sneakers.

The silhouettes of shoes have slimmed down a lot in the past couple of years, and the market seems much bigger for simpler, classic, retro shoes at the moment. Do you think that’s just nostalgia, or was design better before?

I don’t think its nostalgia, I think a lot of what’s coming out are sneakers that try to be classics but take a bad route of taking design hints from old classics.

Where do you see design going from here?

Form and function need to play a big part here. The biggest innovation to come out in the past few years has been the introduction of Nike’s Flywire. There’s great function to fit the form. The Hyperdunk with Flywire is a well designed sneaker that has great form and great function. I hope designers out there can build from that point on. If designers are just designing sneakers to look cool, there’s really no point to them. Those can be considered shoes, but leave them out of the sneakers category.

Finally, do you own a pair of flip-flops?

I own plenty, I take off my sneakers the minute I get to my studio and put on my flip-flops.