I am constantly looking for interesting connections, stories, and inspiration that land somewhere adjacent to sneakers. I am always on the lookout for creativity and marketing in other industries that could be applied back to the footwear business too. I think that is a big part of what makes me different from most creative consultants out there.
On the flip side of that, a lot of you reading this have heard me preach about how much opportunity there is in taking the skills, the strategies, and the mindset you have naturally honed in the sneaker world, and applying all of it to brands and businesses outside of this industry.
Today I want to walk through a real world example of that. Arc’teryx sent me the Konseal Trek, the most expensive shoe the brand has made. And as I was cutting the tape and lifting the lid, I noticed I wasn’t really thinking about the boot at all. I was thinking about why it was in my hands. (Here's the full unboxing if you want to see the boot in hand before we get into it.)
I am not a mountaineer. I live on the California coast. Arc’teryx proves its gear on the granite above Vancouver, cold and vertical and the kind of terrain that ends your day if your feet quit on you. So the obvious thing to do with a $280 mountain boot is send it to someone who lives on a mountain. They sent it to a guy who spent two decades inside sneaker companies.
The groupthink narrative on Arc’teryx right now is the one you’ve probably heard. Gorpcore went mainstream, the dead bird became the logo on every tech worker in the city, luxury outdoor is having its run. We’ve seen this before. You know the take. You have probably read a version of it. And there is nothing wrong with it, except that it stops exactly where the interesting part starts.
Because as I was photographing this boot, the thing that I kept thinking was not that a climbing brand crossed over into fashion. It is that a climbing brand from 1989, one that started making harnesses and chalk bags before it ever made a single piece of clothing, has quietly adopted the entire operating system that sneakers built.
To me that is the real story of the last twenty years, and almost nobody frames it this way. We keep asking whether sneakers are up or down, whether the resale market is cooling, whether the hype is over. Wrong altitude. The more honest question is what sneaker culture exported to the rest of the footwear industry while everyone was busy arguing about the scoreboard.
I’ll start with how this boot got to me, and then get to the real reason I am talking about it today…
