Creativity is King

Once upon a time, there was only one site upon which hypebeasts all over the world could tool around and make ugly shoes that they would never actually buy: NikeiD. In the beginning, their selection was pretty limited, their customization options left something to be desired, but you could DO it–you could design your own shoe. And that, in itself, was pretty revolutionary. A company that, with rare exception, normally manufactured runs of thousands of shoes was willing to make one pair especially for you? Pretty nuts. (Nowadays all you need to do is be Japanese and mildly famous for your own run of Nikes, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Of course, you knew that the rest of the major shoe companies would follow (after they got over the complete SHOCK Nike was able to do something like Nike ID–I can virtually guarantee you that adidas/Puma/Reebok had nothing even SIMILAR in the works before ID came out). And so they have, with varying degrees of success.

For the purposes of this post, I am going to go through the following sites and let you know the positives and negatives of each site:

-NikeiD

-Puma Mongolian BBQ

-YourReebok

-mi adidas

To top it all off, I will post a picture of the best shoe I could come up with in under 5 minutes using each respective site.

Let me end my introduction by saying…fuck all these sites. Go here instead: http://www.thejgcustoms.com/kit/

With that said…away we go.

-NikeiD.

The good: Their selection of base shoes to start from is truly second to none. And not only that, but you can customize bags, backpacks, t-shirts. You could get them all in the same color scheme and be the coolest kid on your block. (I’d stay away from heavy reds and blues if your currently residing in South Central LA.) Their site is crazy easy to use, doesn’t require any excessive loading times, and just has an all-around great look. Also, great graphic representations of the shoe. You know exactly what you are gonna get when you buy it.

The bad: Not much. I think a key area Nike could use some improvement in is the types of materials available on the shoe. Most of the other sites offer several separate types of material on a given part of the shoe, whereas Nike’s max materials offered on most shoes is 2-3. It’d be nice to see some more of their popular shoes available for customization, but that is a pretty minor point.

My 5 minute design:

(By the way, please ask for my permission before you buy any of these colorways. Greatness in shoe-color picking ability is something you’re born with, and that genius should be rewarded.)

-Puma Mongolian BBQ.

The good: Damn near everything. This site is fucking incredible. The materials/color selection are ENORMOUS, you can customize just about every last detail on the shoe, easy to navigate, etc. And the demonstration of what your shoe will look like is awesome. (Take a look below–that’s from the goddamn site!) Puma may not have many options for actual shoes, but they have perfected just about every other aspect.

The bad: The only real negatives are the load times and the fact that you can only pick from three shoes. Another possible negative is that I would be worried your real life shoe wouldn’t look as fucking KILLER as the shoe how it looks on the website. A minor quibble though.

My 5 minute design:

-YourReebok.

The good: Tons of options available in terms of base materials: suedes, faux skins, patent leathers, etc. Pretty easy to navigate site, no big load times, etc. Sweet “here’s what your shoes look like under jeans and kicked up on a ledge overlooking a vast metropolitan city” view, as opposed to just the normal boring “here’s your shoe” views.

The bad: Terrible color selection. Terrible shoe selection. TERRIBLE name. (Really, “YourReebok” is the best you could come up with? Your brand name with the word “Your” in front of it. Really.)

My 5 minute design:

-mi adidas.

The good: Not much. If adidas wants to compete with the rest of these guys, they need some SERIOUS upgrades. The graphics work is okay, but it’d be nice to have a more “real world” version of what your shoes will look like. Right now, they’ve got a virtual reality, “Tron” sorta feel to them.

i.e.

I honestly can’t think of too many more positive things to say about their site though. There are some interesting material options available, but with only 8 colors TOTAL available, it limits your options considerably.

The bad: Like I said, the color options are way too few. The actual site design is incredibly basic, and I mean that in a bad way. Radio buttons have no place on a site like this. Shoe choices are extremely limited (and made to look like they aren’t by showing a bunch of different colors of the same shoe.)

My 5 minute design:

And there you have it. Each site does certain things well (and in some cases, incredibly well). NikeiD and Puma MBQ definitely top the list, followed by Reebok, followed by adidas. I don’t hold out much hope for Reebok, since all of their shoes completely suck and aren’t even worth customizing in the first place, but adidas really needs to step their game up. They have a great selection of shoes to choose from, and they should be able to put together something a LOT better than what they currently have.