You Can't Design a Grail
You do the reps until people realize they underestimated you.
Yesterday I teased that I’d tell you my two grails. So before I get to the part I actually want to talk about, let me pay that off... and let me actually tell you why, because the why is the whole point.
The first is the Deftones Nike Dunk High. Black and green, forty-three pairs, made in 2003 for friends and family of the band to celebrate the self-titled album. Not a retail release. Not a raffle. No campaign. Just a simple design that was never supposed to leave a small circle of people. But they’d be my grails even if they were mass-produced.
I’m from Sacramento. The indomitable city. The always slept-on underdog that never gets counted until it has to be. Deftones are from there too, and they’ve been my favorite band for longer than I can remember. I’ve seen them more times than I can count. I cried when Chi Cheng passed. So when I tell you that a friends-and-family, forty-three pairs made, sneaker is my grail, understand what that actually means. The five-figure resale value has nothing to do with why I want them. Given where I’m from and how long I’ve been in that orbit, there’s a real chance I could have ended up with a pair if that friends-and-family run was pushed to a friends-of-friends, too. Or even if it was released in a different time. I don’t say I was a fan first to sound cool. I say it as a reminder of how that band has shrugged off every label and every naysayer for decades, and how they’re having this almost born-again moment right now with a new audience that was always there but never paid quite enough attention.
I say it because I feel the same about this chapter of my own life. Finding my way through the sneaker business. Writing a book (hopefully the first of many!). Writing this newsletter to some of the sharpest minds in the industry. The decades I spent studying, connecting with people, learning the game, stacking the skills and the relationships until I had a foundation solid enough to finally build things that are mine. Things that feel like validation of years of intentional, unglamorous progress. Same shrug. Same slow turn. Same audience that was there the whole time.
The second grail lives on a site most of you know I’ve got history with. The Sole Collector x Reebok Question, the one a community member named Chris Pardo designed after the lines of a Honda Fit. Grey suedes over a neon midsole that had never been done on the Question before. It came out of a design contest in 2009. Thousands of entries, ten finalists, a public vote. Fewer than twenty pairs were ever made.
I’m a Honda guy, through and through. I make videos about my Hondas. Sole Collector matters to me more than most, so much that when the community lost its home, I built a site to keep that memory alive. And the Reebok Question is one of my all-time favorite sneakers, because Allen Iverson is to me what Michael Jordan is to everyone else. I come from a family that struggled. I was under-sized to play basketball. I was never built to be the greatest of all time. But like Iverson, I’ve got it in me to be better than the best in brief flashes... the kind that make people take a step back and go, wow, I underestimated him. So yeah. Maybe that shoe is the perfect intersection of everything I care about and everything I’ve done, wrapped into one story I didn’t design.
And that’s the thread. I don’t own either one. Odds are I never will, and I guess that’s part of what makes them grails for me... the nearly unobtainable, not the merely expensive. But if either ever surfaced in my size, I’d hardly hesitate to trade away a stack of the pairs I swear I’ll never sell to get it. That’s how I know what these two actually mean to me. Neither one was ever trying to be a grail.
The dominant way we talk about grails now is as a target. Something you engineer. You see it in the way releases get built... the pre-written story, the seeded narrative, the influencer list locked before a single sample exists, the pressure loaded onto a launch to become the thing everyone needs. A young athlete gets a signature shoe and the expectation is that it detonates on day one. Nike is expected to script its comeback like a season finale. Everyone reaching for the shiny object, the new north star, the viral moment.
In my eyes, we’ve got the causality backwards.
You cannot walk into an ideation meeting, a design review, or a marketing plan and decide you’re making a grail. It isn’t yours to decide. A grail is a verdict, and the jury is the culture, the community, the collective energy of a lot of people over a long stretch of time. The Deftones Dunk didn’t know it was a grail in 2003. It was a thank-you gift. The Reebok Question didn’t know either. It was a contest prize for a guy who liked a Honda. What made them grails was everything that happened after, none of which anyone in the room could have manufactured on purpose.
So if you can’t design the outcome, what can you actually control?
