I’m an Archivist. I Just Never Called It That.

What a four-hour conversation with Pete Forester reminded me about why I do this

I’ve been cranking out newsletters for a few months now and somewhere in the middle of all of it I forgot to ask myself why.

Not in a crisis kind of way. More like when you’re moving fast enough that you stop checking whether you’re still pointed in the right direction. I’ve been writing, publishing, building, and it’s been good… although I could clearly use an editor (thank you to those of you have caught my typos!) But I hadn’t really stopped to think about what’s driving all of it until I sat down with Pete Forester recently and talked for four hours about almost everything except sneakers.

Pete has written for Complex, Esquire, and Sole Collector. He hosted two seasons of High Snobiety’s most watched show. He was editorial director at StockX. And he’s one of the more honest people I’ve talked to about what it actually means to write about this stuff for a living.

At some point in the conversation he mentioned that a company he worked for deleted over a thousand pieces of his writing without warning after he left. No email, no heads up. Just gone. And he wasn’t as devastated by it as I expected. His point was that the work was the doing. The conversation was the point, not the archive.

I have been thinking about that every day since. It also made me take a closer look at my work.

I’m an archivist by nature.

I experience things and I want to put them in a box. Hold onto them. Preserve them exactly the way I felt them in the moment, so that when the right audience comes along, I can hand them that box and say here, this is what it was like.

That’s why I started Sneaker History back in 2015. Not because the internet needed another sneaker site. Because I kept seeing stories told wrong, or not told at all, and I couldn’t stand the idea of them disappearing. The brands have their version. The people they pay have their version. But the way it actually felt to be there, to care about those things at that moment in culture... that version was going to get lost if somebody didn’t save it.

That’s what my post about F1 sneakers was really about. Not the shoes. The memory of experiencing that world before it became what it is now, and wanting to hand that to someone who wasn’t there. Williams. Schumacher. Reebok. Those stories existed long before F1 became a lifestyle brand, and they deserved to be told by someone who remembered why they mattered.

It’s why I wear-tested shoes for Nike starting in 2001 and still remember exactly what those early samples felt like on foot. It’s why employee number nine at StockX still means something specific to me, not as a credential but as a moment in time that I was actually inside of. It’s why the Sneaker History podcast, six years and hundreds of episodes in, still feels like the most honest thing I’ve made. Because it was never about what the brands wanted people to know. It was about what we actually remembered.

Pete made a point about what he called the brick of copy. The block of text that gets written for every product page because it needs to exist, not because anyone expects you to read it. And whatever real story that aproduct carries, the people, the history, the feeling of being in the room when it happened, none of that fits in the brick.

From Pete’s Instagram

I’ve written about this before in different ways. The App Killed the Sneakerhead was really about the same thing... every brand wanting to control the story inside their own ecosystem, shrinking the space for independent voices in the process. And sometimes the universe proves your point for you right after you publish it.

I’ve got another story along those lines that I’ve been sitting on for a while. A few years back a brand reached out about covering a collaboration with one of the biggest YouTubers in the world. I said sure, send the shoes, but I’d love to have the creator on the podcast too. The PR person said she’d check with higher ups. A week went by. I followed up. The reply came back: the YouTuber was very busy, so the podcast wasn’t possible. Neither were the shoes.

No conversation. No story. No shoes. Just control.

I’m going to write that one up properly soon, because it’s a perfect example of how brands think about independent media... not as partners, but as a distribution channel they can switch on and switch off depending on whether you’re willing to play by their rules. If you’re a paid subscriber, that one’s coming your way.

That's what separates this from the brick. Not that independent voices are smarter or more righteous than the people filling product pages for a living. I've been that person. But the brick exists to move product. What I'm doing here exists to preserve something. The feeling of being inside a moment before it gets rewritten by whoever owns the marketing budget.

Pete will tell you the doing is the work. The archive doesn’t matter, the conversation was the point, move on to the next puzzle. I’ll tell you the archiving is the work. Hold onto it, preserve it, find the audience that wasn’t there the first time. Two people who’ve spent decades in the same industry and found completely different reasons to keep going.

But here’s what I’m willing to bet. For you, it’s going to be something different entirely. And if you’re still trying to figure out what it is, start writing. Not for an audience, not for an algorithm, not for a brand. Just write. It has a way of showing you the answer before you even finish the sentence.

The full conversation with Pete is linked below. It goes a lot of places. That’s kind of the point.

Keep building.

-Nick

Listen to the full episode: Apple - Spotify - On The Web (for links to other platforms)

Pete publishes at peteforester.substack.com and is @Pete_Forester on most platforms.

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I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for nearly two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... sneaker lore, and the stories that connect what we wear to who we are.

If you want the deeper stuff - the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from my 20+ years in this business - become a paid subscriber.