Glide Sneakers

Overview

ROLES
Product Designer
Sewer

TOOLS
Adobe Creative Cloud (Ai, Id, Lr), Laser Cutter, Needle and thread

TIME FRAME
4 weeks
Spring 2019

Project Background

How would you sew a one-piece shoe ?

I never thought we’d be designing shoes so soon in my major, yet here we are! But there’s a twist to this project—the sneakers had to be assembled from a single, continuous pattern. We were given some industrial grade black felt to manipulate in any shape or form to create our sneakers.

Take a graceful stride

Emulating a butterfly, Glide sneakers are light as they are delicate. I utilized a subtle butterfly wing design to add a sense of transient beauty to the shoes. Our sneakers have an undulating, wavy border to further enhance the intricate structure of a wing.

Graceful, Subtle, Delicate

I chose to develop the form of the sneaker in an elegant wrapping manner that would make it appear more feminine. I wanted to use rich surface patterns to add a texture to the felt, and would make the plain, black surface appear more visually interesting. The final form I went with ended up being heavily inspired by butterfly wings, with a wrapped upper-sole and layered wing surface pattern.

Concept Ideation

Prototyping

Prototype 1:

I drew the initial layout in Adobe Illustrator before utilizing a laser cutter to cut my felt into the sneaker pattern. I struggled to sew it together, and ended up with a lumpy, scrunched up shoe that didn’t reflect the form I was trying to make. To make the form sleeker, I decided to change the shape of the heel counter and the toe cap.

Somehow, I ended up disliking my second prototype even more than my first one. The band added too much height and made the sneaker too loose and wobbly when worn. The patterned heel counter added too much bulk, and it was a pain to sew. The way I laid the side band that wrapped around the shoe was too difficult to sew neatly. I decided to revert and improve on the first prototype for my final model.

Prototype 2:

Almost at the end

The best change I made was layering the soles to add height and removing the band. Doing so immediately made the form far more sleeker and was easier to sew, Combining the wrap around portion and the heel counter removed a majority of the bulk from the back, while adding a tongue made the shoe feel more “sneaker-like”.

Final Model

FLUX Exhibition

This project was included in our FLUX exhibition, where it was packaged according to our collective brand. We decided to include an instruction pamphlet which illustrates how the shoe was constructed so that the customer can see how this fun little one-piece sneaker was sewn together.