With his latest sneaker, the Curry 3, Steph Curry has managed to overcome the bad press around his “Chef Curry 2” shoe, which many likened it to a “dad” shoe. (It actually sold quite well, for what it’s worth).
I spoke to Kort Neumann, Senior Sneaker Designer at Under Armour, who provided insight on what it is like working with the unanimous MVP to create a shoe that matches his unique game.
Sportsnet: How involved was Steph Curry in the design process of the shoe?
Kort Neumann: We showed him sketches from the very beginning and gave him a story of how we wanted to go with it and then let him guide us in how we should proceed with the shoe.
We gave him a bunch of different tech ideas, aesthetics to see where he was vibe-ing at the time. That leads us into going into a second phase of illustration, refinement, design, finding materials and defining the concepts a little bit more. And so he is basically with us every step of the way. He’s pretty involved.
How is the design process initiated?
KN: Every season we’ll ask him, because his mindset will be different. So I like to start fresh and say what do you want to focus on this season? Is it comfort? Is it stability, traction? And we will throw thing out things to see what sticks. I’ll even have him circle sketches of what he likes and ‘x’ out the sketches that he doesn’t— if he wasn’t feeling one of those ideas I want to know immediately so I don’t go down the wrong path.
Coming off an unanimous MVP season, I’d be reluctant to change much. What was the thought process in the added technology in the Curry 3?
KN: We added some new pieces of tech to the shoe.
You have your Threadborne upper, which is essentially paracord. The idea behind that was to create something lightweight but strong. When you have it in its linear fashion it gives you containment but is also flexible and breathable so we wanted to play with that idea.
In the lateral and medial part of the heel we have carbon fibre wings. And those wings are basically there to aid in the subtalar joint. He is such a quick player and once his heel plants and he changes direction we want those wings to aid in supporting that heel so that he can move quickly from one direction to the other.
Cord from a parachute isn’t the first thing I’d think of to put in a basketball shoe. How’d you reach that conclusion?
KN: We were trying to figure out a tech style that would do what we wanted it to do: Retain and be structural and again be flexible and also breathable. We started looking at the type of materials that could do that and we started looking at parachutes.
And you look at a paracord— these things are light, their thin and they can hold a human body falling through the sky. We thought that would be a pretty good application, so we wanted to see if we could get these things shrunk down to a micro level and take that idea and put them together. I myself have a paracord bracelet so that helped with the inspiration.
We’ve already seen some lifestyle versions of this shoe withe the Primo Lux. Was that taken in consideration when building the performance shoe?
KN: When I’m designing I tend to think, can I make this shoe lifestyle? Can this be worn on and off court? That’s actually one of the requests Steph wanted was that he wanted his shoes to be more wearable off court so I took that to heart. So different materials can change the aesthetics, so for the Lux versions we changed it and made it a little less performance oriented and turned up the lifestyle dial a little bit so we had some rough edges added some leather with some stitching in there and some quilting that just upped the value.
The Chef Curry’s didn’t fair well online. They were ridiculed on social media. Did that have an impact on how this shoe was approached?
KN: The colour-ways to the shoe all have different stories tied to them. We are focusing a lot on the colours. We have a team that is focusing on the stories. Going back to the Chef that actually sold quite a bit. Personally I’m happy with that. I thought it was a clean shoe but we took that under regard and played with colours with this shoe.
There are eight colours on your website and 10 at the launch event but I’ve already seen him wearing three colour ways I haven’t seen anywhere. Where are those from?
KN: He has some colour ways that he enjoys so we’ll make PE’s (player exclusives) for him to play on court that won’t necessarily retail. So every now and again you’ll see him wearing something just for him and keeping it fresh.
I noticed the Under Armour logo is less prominent on this shoe. Why?
KN: During the design process Steph wanted to have his logo be large and highly visible hence the large SC logo going in and out on the heel. It’s always a balance because we want to represent UA but we also want to represent Steph. With this shoe we took the chance and made his logo nice and prominent and had the UA on the tongue.
Are you already working with him on the Curry four?
KN: That process can take typically a year or slightly over. We are currently working on the four and we are speaking with Steph directly. So he’s got the run down, seen the sketches and we are working collaboratively to get that done. We’re in the midway phase of that shoe.
