Behind the design: adidas Originals Deerupt

Deerupt comes from the archive. We physically went into our archive and said ‘OK, what do we want to play with now? What new territory would we like to explore? We found this shoe from the mid-80s with the webbing, and we asked ourselves how could we play with that. The first conversation was just to play with the grid on the outside of the shoe, but then we wanted to stretch that idea to the maximum and hence we came up with the idea to play with the grid on the entire upper as well.

The shoe is very new, very bold. It’s something we have never done before, but at the same time it is very much related to the archive of the brand. Like the EQT, the Deerupt’s philosophy is taking something from the past and putting it into the context of 2018 consumers.

This shoe was clearly meant to be unisex. Sometimes we feel some shoes are targeted towards men or women, but with Deerupt we were thinking about a consumer who has a different approach to aesthetics and who has a much more sophisticated and minimalistic approach to design. We saw men and women at fashion week wearing minimal outfits and the footwear was the statement. So our approach was to be unisex, bold and colourful.

The construction of some shoes we have created like NMD and EQT was more complicated and so we wanted to do something very simple. We say ‘disruptive’ as the shoe is very new and we also say it is 'disruptive' through the grid. The shoe is simple: there are no stripes, there is no Boost. If you look at the triple white and black colourways from a distance, they look very simple. The ambition was to trigger an emotional reaction, as while it is simple, it does something different to all the other shoes we have created. We believe it is disruptive from a cultural standpoint, too. It is special and that was the intention.

 

There was a lot of discussion about that, but it came down to the consumer – the Deerupt consumer is different to the Three Stripe consumer. Do we want to bring the Three Stripes into the future? We will have to think about that at some point, but we wanted to launch something different right now. The grid is bold enough. I like that even though there are no stripes and no Trefoil, you can still tell that the Deerupt is an adidas shoe.

It was really about the consumer. When we were brainstorming, we wanted to make something more approachable than the NMD with a lower price point and something true to us. When we create a shoe we usually go to the factory a few times to nail the concept and it takes about four to five rounds of samples to get something right. But the very first sample of the Deerupt was 95% there. After that we tried to over complicate it and we created four different shoes. We then realised the first one was the best, because it was simple. So the creative process is very different from one shoe to another. This one was more colourful, with the colours being chosen from the archive. It taps into art/design, but still engages with street culture. We are a sports brand, but everything we do has to be seen through the lens of culture. Nothing is done by accident.