Kanye Made a Shoe Ugly on Purpose

In 2017, Steven Smith got a confusing phone call.

Smith was a legend in the sneaker industry. He'd been designing shoes for over thirty years. He created the New Balance 574, the 997, the 1500. He designed the Reebok Instapump Fury. People called him the "Godfather of Dad Shoes" because his chunky New Balance designs had become the unofficial uniform of suburban fathers everywhere.

Kanye West wanted him to make something strange.

This was confusing because Kanye had just released the Yeezy Boost 350. The 350 was everything the sneaker market wanted in 2017. Minimalist. Clean. One piece of primeknit fabric wrapped around your foot. Simple lines, simple colors, simple everything.

The sneaker industry had spent years moving toward this aesthetic. Nike's Flyknit Racer. Adidas's NMD. Ultra Boost. Every major brand was competing to make shoes lighter, thinner, more streamlined.

And Kanye was asking Smith to do the opposite.

"I didn't know what he was asking me to do," Smith later recalled. "The 350 had just launched, and that had set the new direction. One piece, knitted, simplistic, minimalist. And he's asking me to do this thing with all these pieces and old-school overlays and busy midsole."

Over forty-eight hours of sketching and back-and-forth, they created the Yeezy 700 Wave Runner.

It was chunky. It was busy. It had four different materials on the upper. The midsole looked like a pile of unrelated shapes stacked together. The colorway combined grey, teal, orange, and black in a way that seemed almost random.

It looked like something your dad would wear to mow the lawn in 1994.

The Reaction

The sneaker community was not impressed.

When the Wave Runner debuted at Kanye's Season 5 fashion show in February 2017, the responses followed a predictable pattern. Month one: "Trash." Month two: "I need to see them on feet." Release day: "Who's got the plug?"

The shoe sat for a while after its initial release. At $300, people weren't sure it was worth the investment. The resale market, which typically explodes for Yeezy releases, was quiet. Some buyers who'd snagged pairs actually let them go at or below retail.

This was unheard of for a Yeezy release.

But then something started to shift. Celebrities were photographed wearing them. Fashion editors started writing about them. The sneaker sitting in people's closets unworn started appearing on feet.

By the time Adidas announced a restock in 2018, everyone wanted a pair. People who'd mocked the shoe six months earlier were suddenly claiming they'd loved it from day one.

"We mentally live in the future," Smith said later. "We wait for everybody else to catch up to us."

The Billion-Dollar Ugly Shoe

The Wave Runner didn't just succeed. It started a movement.

Within months, every major brand was releasing chunky sneakers. Nike brought back the Air Monarch and launched the M2K Tekno. Adidas released the Yung-1. New Balance leaned harder into their dad shoe heritage. Fila revived the Disruptor.

High fashion went even further. Balenciaga released the Triple S, an $895 monster that looked like three different shoes had been fused together under enormous pressure. The Wall Street Journal called it "ugly." GQ called it "a chunky, bulky, overdone take on a dad sneaker." The New York Times called them "homely clompers."

Balenciaga's creative director, Demna Gvasalia, considered this perfect praise. "I'm not part of this ugly fashion," he said. "I never liked ugly stuff really." But he understood that pushing boundaries was part of his job. Ugliness, in fashion, could be a righteous path.

The Triple S became one of luxury fashion's biggest hits. Balenciaga grew faster than any other brand in parent company Kering's portfolio. Millennials and men, both big buyers of sneakers and casual clothes, became Balenciaga's fastest-growing customer segments.

"There's not a dinner I go to where a father or someone doesn't say 'stop releasing these shoes, it's out of control, we spend too much money at Balenciaga,'" the company's CEO said. He was very happy to hear these complaints.

By 2021, Yeezy was generating $1.7 billion in annual revenue for Adidas. The brand accounted for nearly 10% of Adidas's total revenue and over 40% of its profits.

All from shoes that people initially called ugly.

Why Ugly Works

This makes no sense if you think about fashion the normal way.

The normal way: people want to look good. Looking good means wearing attractive things. Attractive things follow certain principles. Symmetry. Proportion. Harmony. Clean lines.

The Wave Runner violated all of these principles. It was asymmetrical, bulky, disharmonious. The colors clashed. The shapes competed with each other. Nothing about it said "attractive" in any conventional sense.

So why did it work?

The answer has to do with how status actually functions.

In a world where everyone is trying to look good in the same way, true status comes from being able to deviate. The person wearing something conventionally attractive signals that they understand the rules. The person wearing something unconventionally attractive signals that they're above the rules.

This only works if you have enough status to pull it off. A random person wearing the Wave Runner in 2016, before anyone knew what it was, would have just looked like they had bad taste. Kanye West wearing the Wave Runner in 2017 looked like a visionary.

The shoe's ugliness was actually its value proposition. It was a test. Could you wear this and still be cool? If yes, you had transcended ordinary fashion. If no, you probably shouldn't have bought it.

This is what luxury theorists call "countersignaling." Instead of demonstrating status through obviously expensive or attractive items, you demonstrate status by wearing things that would make a less secure person look foolish.

The dad shoe trend was countersignaling at scale.

The Designer's Paradox

Steven Smith understood something important about his own career.

He'd spent decades designing shoes that prioritized function over flash. New Balance shoes were never the coolest option. They were the sensible option. The shoes your parents wore because they were comfortable and well-made.

This made them uncool for years. And then it made them extremely cool.

"People give you lots of money, you have taste and you can get really good lights somehow," Smith observed about the Yeezy operation. But the magic wasn't in the resources. It was in the willingness to make something that didn't fit.

"Everything else was so simple and clean," he said about the sneaker market when the Wave Runner was being developed. "And out of it came this thing where people are like, 'What are we doing that thing for?'"

The answer was: precisely because nobody else was doing it.

Kanye later told Smith: "I made you design your New Balance shoe as if you worked there thirty years later." Smith agreed. The Wave Runner was the logical extension of everything he'd been doing, just pushed to an extreme that felt radical in 2017.

Sometimes the future looks like the past, exaggerated.

The Foam Runner

If the Wave Runner tested the boundaries of what people would accept, Kanye's later designs obliterated them.

The Yeezy Foam Runner, introduced in 2020, looked like a Croc had been attacked by an industrial shredder. It was a single piece of foam with seemingly random holes cut throughout. No laces. No structure. Just alien-looking footwear that defied categorization.

People lost their minds. The shoe looked like nothing that had come before. Fashion critics used words like "befuddled" and "bewildered" because there was simply no vocabulary for what they were seeing.

It became a massive success. At $80, it was one of the cheapest Yeezys ever released, and demand was enormous. Kanye called it his favorite Yeezy design because he'd always wanted to make a shoe without laces. The laceless design that seemed like a flaw was actually the entire point.

Each new Yeezy release pushed further into territory that seemed commercially suicidal. The Yeezy 450 looked like a sock attached to a claw. The Yeezy Knit Runner looked like a foot-shaped balloon. People mocked each one, then lined up to buy them.

The Mathematics of Ugly

Here's what makes this genuinely strange from a business perspective.

In most industries, differentiation is supposed to make your product better. You differentiate by being higher quality, faster, more reliable, more beautiful. You compete by being more of the things people already want.

The ugly shoe trend differentiated by being less of what people thought they wanted. The Wave Runner wasn't better-looking than competitor shoes. It was aggressively worse-looking, by conventional standards.

But this created a different kind of value. In a sea of sleek, minimal sneakers that all looked vaguely similar, the Wave Runner was impossible to confuse with anything else. It had maximum differentiation.

In signaling terms, it was expensive to wear. Not just financially expensive, though at $300 it wasn't cheap. Socially expensive. Wearing the Wave Runner required confidence. You had to be willing to look unusual. You had to be secure enough in your own taste to trust something that mainstream opinion rejected.

This social expense became a feature. The shoe filtered its own customer base. Only people with certain levels of confidence, taste, or social capital would wear it. Which meant that wearing it signaled those qualities.

What Kanye Understood

Look at Kanye's career and you see a pattern.

808s and Heartbreak, his 2008 album, was criticized for its heavy use of Auto-Tune and its emotional vulnerability at a time when hip-hop valued neither. It's now considered one of the most influential albums of the decade.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was an maximalist opus in an era of minimalist beats. Yeezus was an abrasive industrial record that alienated casual fans. Both are now considered classics.

The pattern: do something that seems wrong by current standards, get criticized, then watch the culture shift toward you.

The Wave Runner followed this exact trajectory. Do something that seems wrong. Get criticized. Wait. Be vindicated.

This isn't contrarianism for its own sake. Kanye wasn't just doing the opposite of what was popular. He was identifying things that were about to become popular and getting there first.

In 2017, the pendulum of sneaker fashion had swung as far as possible toward minimalism. Everything that could be removed from a shoe had been removed. There was nowhere left to go in that direction.

The only place left to go was back the other way. Toward maximalism. Toward excess. Toward the dad shoe.

Kanye saw the pendulum about to swing before anyone else did. Or maybe he pushed it himself. Either way, he got there first.

The Lesson

The Wave Runner cost $300 and sold millions of units. Balenciaga's Triple S cost $895 and became one of luxury fashion's defining products. The dad shoe trend generated billions of dollars across the entire sneaker industry.

All because someone was willing to make something ugly.

The lesson isn't that ugly is good. Plenty of ugly products fail. The lesson is that differentiation has to be visible. In a market where everyone is competing on the same axis, the winning strategy might be to compete on a different axis entirely.

The Wave Runner didn't try to be the most minimal sneaker. It tried to be the least minimal sneaker. It claimed a territory that nobody else was competing for.

This only works if you have the credibility to pull it off. Kanye had built years of trust with sneaker consumers through the Yeezy 750 and Yeezy 350. He'd proven he understood design. So when he released something that seemed to contradict everything he'd done before, people were willing to trust that he knew something they didn't.

The ugly shoe trend was a masterclass in contrarian positioning. But it only worked because the people behind it had earned the right to be contrarian.

What We Do at Soar

We think about differentiation constantly.

Most brands try to be better than their competitors on the same dimensions. Faster shipping. Higher quality. Better customer service. These matter. But they're also what everyone competes on.

The Wave Runner didn't compete on the axis of "most attractive shoe." It created a new axis. And on that axis, it had no competition.

We help brands find their version of this. Not necessarily making something ugly. But identifying the dimension where you can be uniquely positioned, even if that position seems counterintuitive.

If everyone in your market is zigging, maybe it's time to zag. If you want to explore what that looks like for your brand, book a call with our team.