This year has been a strange one for NBA sneaker deals. New Balance hired a $1 million intern, Los Angeles Laker Kyle Kuzma signed with a sneaker reselling app, Puma gave all its new signees access to a private jet, and Converse relaunched its basketball program with Washington Wizard Kelly Oubre Jr. but he's not wearing the brand on the court. And then there's Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie, who put up 18 points and 4 assists against Cleveland this week...while wearing a pair of shoes celebrating early '90s anime series Yu Yu Hakusho.
Dinwiddie is a quarter of the way through a project that will span all 82 games of the NBA season. He plans to wear a different shoe, made in collaboration with sneaker customizer Kickasso, every night. During away games he pays tribute to the city he's in—he wore shoes honoring Rosa Parks during the Nets home opener in Detroit, where the civil rights activist lived for most of her life. He uses most of these opportunities to spotlight black icons: so far this season he's put Parks, Langston Hughes, Jesse Owens, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, Colin Kaepernick, Frederick Douglass, and Muhammad Ali on shoes.
Home games are for him. "A lot of [the home game shoes] are going to be a tour through my mind," he tells me at the Brooklyn Nets' training facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Those Yu Yu Hakusho characters, for example, that gritted their teeth on the side of Dinwiddie's shoes were a callback to his childhood, when he would watch anime with his brother.
The artwork doesn't cover generic Adidas or Nike sneakers, either. Many players across sports will customize by airbrushing. Kickasso, Dinwiddie's partner on the shoes, has created Grinch cleats for NFL star Odell Beckham Jr.; other NBA players have worn sneakers done up with images of Friday the 13th villain Jason Voorhees, The Joker, and Homer from The Simpsons. All of these are done on pre-existing Nike and Adidas shoes. Dinwiddie, though, through a partnership with an organization called Project Dream, does something almost unheard of in the NBA: he produces his own shoes.
When Dinwiddie came into the league and played for the Detroit Pistons he wore Nikes. But after two seasons he was traded to Chicago, swiftly cut by the Bulls, spent some time in the NBA's version of the minors, the G League, and then was eventually picked up by Brooklyn. At that point he says, "no really big company wanted to sign me."
So, in 2016, he started making his own sneakers under the brand name K8iros (pronounced Kyros). But to hear Dinwiddie tell it, the project really started almost two decades ago. Dinwiddie says he was eight when he first started sketching out his own shoes. "I drew them and wrote descriptions for them. I was so serious," he says. In the descriptions, he'd write out all the tech that was used in the shoe. If one had Nike Air cushioning, he'd point to it and then write out why it was important and revolutionary. "It was like my Iron Man armor," he says.
Dinwiddie finally got a chance to bring these drawings to life after he joined the Nets. In 2016, he visited China with then-teammate Jeremy Lin. He played in Lin's celebrity game, went on the country's hit show Dunk of China, and then visited factories in China to see where his shoes would be made.
The trip was the stuff of Young Dinwiddie's dreams: he sat in factory conference rooms and listened to spiels about types of foam lighter and more responsive than ETPU (a material used by Adidas and Puma). "You walk through there and they treat you like royalty," he says. "It was like having Pablo Escobar reach out to you, and be like 'Look, let's do this together.' I'll come, and show you the whole situation. How it runs, the whole nine. You just got to go out there and be the face of this."
That Dinwiddie is producing his own line of shoes without the backing of a major company speaks to how sneaker deals operate in today's NBA. A player starting his own brand from scratch is often a punchline: recall Stephon Marbury's $15 Starburys, or the Ball family and their $495 Big Baller Brand shoes. Michael Jordan had Nike's infrastructure; Chuck Taylor had Converse's.
Dinwiddie wants to do what no other player's done before: create his own successful line of sneakers from the ground up.
The timing could not be better. The nature of partnerships brokered between brands and players is changing. Think of Oubre, who only has to wear Converse off the court, or of Kuzma and his unique hook up. Dinwiddie, who is also the league's most vocal cryptocurrency advocate, sees this as the perfect time to launch a shoe brand by painting Rosa Parks cartoons on the side of sneakers. "If we're looking at logical leaps, we are looking at the mode of decentralization in business," he says. The thinking is that people are losing faith in institutions and big companies—banks, governments, and maybe multinational athletic apparel corporations (Big Sneakers). That opens up a theoretical lane for currency that doesn't require government backing—and maybe, Dinwiddie thinks, sneaker brands, too. This is a lofty way to describe what's actually a pretty simple social-media fueled phenomenon, though.
With social media, players can promote whatever they want on their own platform. P.J. Tucker may not be the best player on the Houston Rockets, but he's still the sneaker king. Dinwiddie gives me what he calls his "Death Row pitch," referencing the record label founded by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight. "If you are tired of your label taking all your money," he says, "come over here. You'll have your own brand. Own it. Control it."
Now that he's opted out of working with a major brand, Dinwiddie says he's never going back. Even if the companies that snubbed him back in 2016 are probably ready to come to the table now, he believes he already has the better situation. According to Dinwiddie, the average Nike contract is somewhere in the range of $25 to $50,000 ("And you take taxes out of it. So only $13,000 or $27,000," he adds). A representative from Nike wouldn't confirm those numbers but explained that deals work in tiers, from the superstar players with signature shoes to rotation players who are only furnished product. Dinwiddie's figures do match with what NBA agents have previously said.
Dinwiddie's hoping to beat those figures when he brings the shoes—without illustration—to retail on Saturday, December 8th. He'll sell a black and a white version through the Project Dream website for $150 (He'll also accept crypto as payment). He hopes the price is in the sweet spot. Dinwiddie says the shoe uses high quality materials—it passed muster with Brooklyn's training staff. But he was conscious not to price people out either. "I told them, I won't make this shoe over $200," he says. "Even if it cuts into our margins. I won't do that to people." When the shoe goes on sale, Dinwiddie will have over 100,000 followers on Instagram to share the news with. That might be a fraction of Nike's 82.7 million, but Dinwiddie only needs to do a fraction of the Swoosh's sale for this to be a success. That's what Dinwiddie means when he talks about the decentralization of business. A decade ago, players of Dinwiddie's caliber—a worthy Sixth Man of the Year candidate on a team that will probably finish outside the playoffs—didn't have a six-figure audience to blast news out to. Now, he does.
Even if he doesn't wind up better off from a financial perspective, though, Dinwiddie says he still prefers his own brand. He's auctioning off every one of his custom-made game-worn shoe and using the money to create college scholarships. "Even if we didn't make any money on the other side, I can use my shoes to send kids to college," he says. "That alone is enough for me."
The charitable arm of Dinwiddie's shoes doesn't even take into the account the autonomy he's afforded by going solo. It's hard to imagine Nike or Adidas setting up players not named LeBron James with custom shoes honoring Bruce Lee, anime characters, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and late Marvel comics creator Stan Lee. There is maybe one reason above all the others not to give up the brand he started. "It's so much more fun on this side," he says.
