Making perfect travel shoes that are incredibly light and ridiculously comfortable…

min.jpg">Vince Lebon, Founder of Rollie Nation (the shoe lifestyle brand for the young at heart), joins Stephanie Benedetto and Samanta Cortes in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

• Meeting Stephanie on a sustainability panel
• Rollie Nation, a footwear brand started around 5 years ago in Australia, lightweight, extreme risk with color and prints
• A community that wants to express themselves through footwear, just living and enjoying life
• Lace Up, a reality TV show, designing sneakers for celebrities
• Wanting to take a design sabbatical, working with the ex creative director of Jordan brand and first materials designer at Nike
• The power of persistence in getting in, how he thought the show is docudrama and it became real reality show, not a great environment to create
• The amount and level of work one can create was amazing
• Growing up playing basketball in Australia, getting a job in afootwear company as multimedia designer, how he got good at designing shoes realistically in Photoshop that weren’t even made and selling them
• Spec sheets for footwear
• How the Rollie Nation shoe is lighter than a pair of flip-flops, but fully functional
• Well-made shoes, how he took out shanks, and created an invisible heel to distribute weight, and don’t need the shank
• Found thin plastic counterweights which hold shape, taking things out, keeping what’s necessary
• Most customers are not designers, don’t know how materials work together etc.
• Customization can be for or with you, and can be from performance to materials to appearance
• Protecting IP, the bigger Rollie Nation gets, the more they get copied, including an entire line being copied before release — brand loyalty helps protect IP
• Material science will be increasingly very important
• Lebon feels the future holds satellite factories closer to market, will be heavily robotic-focused
• Synergy amongst designers, collaboration is the biggest focus
• Rollie Nation is not a shoe company, but an experience brand that makes footwear Lebon’s interest in designing a hotel
• Where the name Rollie Nation came from (and it is not where you think), playfulness and community
• The goal of no waste with other materials, genetically modified leathers
• Semi-transparent leather
• Lebon’s favorite mobile apps
• Why not to get complacent

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