He Drew His Own Shoes Himself
Marc Johnson and the thing about people who build from scratch.
I thought about writing about something else today. Every turn led me back to this.
Marc Johnson passed away yesterday. He was 49.
I don’t know how to write about death in this newsletter, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured it out. What I know is that Marc Johnson mattered, to skateboarding, to skate footwear, to a generation of people who watched his video parts and understood for the first time what was actually possible on a board. And because this newsletter exists at the intersection of sneaker culture and the people who built it, I’d feel wrong saying nothing.
MJ was your favorite skateboarder’s favorite skateboarder. That’s not a line, it’s just true. The skaters who became icons watched Marc Johnson first. His part in Fully Flared is the kind of thing people study, not just watch. Technical, creative, unhurried in a way that somehow made everything look harder than it was. He had taste in an era when taste was the whole game.
Whether it was Maple’s Seven Steps to Heaven in 1996, Lakai’s Fully Flared in 2007, or adidas’ Away Days in 2016, or any of the dozens of parts in between, Marc’s dedication to his craft produced footage that defined eras. And maybe it’s just my memory, but his sections always seemed longer than everyone else’s, packed tighter, like he was physically incapable of leaving good footage on the floor. That Fully Flared part ran close to 15 minutes in a video full of legends. He won Thrasher’s Skater of the Year off the back of it. It earned every second.
He also drew his own shoe.
I watched an interview years ago, maybe 8 or 10 years back, where Marc talked about the original Emerica signature. He said he still had the drawings, the ones where he sketched out the silhouette and worked out the “M” graphic on the side by hand. Before there was a sample, before there was a production run, there was a skateboarder with a pencil figuring out what his shoe was supposed to look like. That image has stayed with me. The idea that the thing millions of people eventually wore on their feet started as a sketch in Marc Johnson’s hands.
Emerica reissued it in 2009 as the OG, and has been bringing that shoe back over the last few years as the OG-1, released across a range of colorways, and the demand has been consistent every time it drops. That’s not nostalgia for its own sake. That’s a silhouette that earned its place and keeps earning it.
Marc also co-founded enjoi with Rodney Mullen in 2000, one of the most beloved skate brands of that era, and was a central figure in what became Lakai Footwear. He left enjoi in 2007, years before corporate ownership came in and began the slow hollowing out that Louie Barletta spent three years undoing. Barletta announced on Valentine’s Day this year that he had finally gotten enjoi back after a years-long fight against what he described simply as corporate greed.
Barletta was the one who confirmed Marc’s passing yesterday, through a tribute shared by Thrasher Magazine. He called Marc a genius and a tortured soul, and wrote that without a shadow of a doubt, Marc Johnson was the single most influential person in his life. He said Marc had visited him in San Jose just weeks before, that he seemed excited, full of life, that he handed Barletta a list of his hopes and dreams for the future. He also mentioned that at the Away Days premiere in 2016, he had sat next to Marc and watched his friend’s work on screen together, both of them probably not knowing then that it would be the last time.
I don’t know how to hold that.
What feels worth saying in a newsletter that spends most of its time on brand strategy and market signals, is that the things we talk about when we talk about authenticity, the things that make a brand worth saving, the things that make a shoe worth sketching by hand and reissuing 25 years later, they come from somewhere. They come from specific people who cared enough to draw the thing themselves, to build the team themselves, to put footage on a timeline until it was actually right.
Marc Johnson didn’t have a perfect career. He was transparent about that. He talked openly about addiction and recovery and the pressure of being someone the whole industry was watching. That honesty is part of what made him matter. He wasn’t a legend because everything went right. He was a legend because of what he made when it was hardest.
The sneaker industry I’ve worked in for over two decades is full of people like that. People who built something real before anyone was paying attention, and who watched it get passed around and diluted and extracted, and who kept showing up anyway. Marc Johnson was one of those people. The OG-1 is on shop walls right now because he drew it first. enjoi is alive again because Louie Barletta loved what Marc helped build enough to three years fighting to take it back.
The person is always the story.
Rest easy, MJ.
-Nick