James Arizumi - What the Dunk

You worked on one of the most influential sneakers of all time—the What The Dunk—walk us through the process of how that came to life.

James Arizumi: That’s a great story. I designed it on a whim, actually. In SB, a lot of the Dunks were being bought by non-skaters. For me, I wanted to make shoes that skaters wanted to rock. The Dunk was this hype shoe, and What The Dunk was an inside joke—skateboarding has a lot of inside jokes—so the joke was, “what if I put every shoe that everyone wanted on one shoe?” The Pigeons, you know, all the shoes on one shoe, then it would be like the ring—one ring to rule them all. Then they (non-skaters) could just move on and I could make skate shoes.

So I pitched the shoe to Sandy Bodecker and the team and they were like, “James, that's the ugliest shoe we've ever seen.” I was laughing. I was not offended at all. I mean, that was kind of the point. They're like, “wait... both shoes are different? That's insane. We're not gonna do that.” So they shelved it for two years.

Then when Nothing But The Truth came out, the team needed a hitter for the video and tour and they asked where that ugly shoe was—to bring it out for this thing. Shout out to Darin O'Brien and the rest of the crew—they made it happen.

We launched in each city that the film premiered in with a key retailer. So New York we launched with Supreme, and that's the only way you could get it. We really tied it (the shoe) to the film but the joke was that it was shelved for two years because it was so ridiculous.

How many different shoes make up the What The Dunk?

Oh, man. I can't even count. I would say like 32? Honestly, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking on that one. I was like, “How many panels and how many shoes can I fit on this one shoe?” And the developers lost their minds. They were like, “Dude, we can't build this. This is crazy!” Shout outs to the dev team at SB, they've worked on some crazy stuff.

Explore more Dunk stories in the Nike SB Vault.