Anthony Nathan

Öus Chef São Crispim Imperial

08—12—2017 Photos by: Kickstory

Interview # 45

Anthony Nathan is a graphic and product designer for @ous_oficial. He participated in the development and creation of several products and told us the story behind one of the first sneakers he made for the brand.

“My name is Anthony Nathan and I’m 30 years old. Work with design and art since I was 15 years old, and I’ve been working at Öus since 2011. Here I work as a graphic and product designer, and I work on the creation and development of every collection or product. I developed my relationship with sneakers right here, I used to draw some products and stuff, for other small brands I had. I always looked at Öus differently, because of the quality, it’s weight, and all the stories behind everything we do here.

This sneaker represents lot to me, I could have picked any of the sneaker I help develop, but this one is special because it tells the story of a Saint shoemaker, Saint Crispin. Here we have a date of birth, we have our Saint, a bunch of things that helps us tell the brands story. Anyway , this sneaker was made in 2011 and it was it was one of the first ones I worked on.

There is this chapelry out in Franca called Paróquia São Crispim. We went there out of nowhere, there it was, a 3m by 4m frame. We photographed it, edited the image, and transferred it to the leather.”

Nathan, what’s your relationship with sneakers in general?

~~nathan~~I have a relationship with products that tell a stories, that have something more within them – when it’s not just a sneaker with an upper and a outsole. I like it when it has some special detail like a phrase or it’s made with some special material that tells something about the sneaker. So to me it’s about Design, function but it’s also the stories.

I usually donate a lot of them, I used to have a lot of sneakers put away at home, but one day I realised that there was no use for all of them, so I get a lot of new shoes but I give a lot of them away.

Did you work with sneakers before you started working at Öus?

~~nathan~~I already had two small local clothing brands, that weren’t even registered or nothing (laughs), I used to draw the products, do collabs with other artist and etc. But not with sneakers, everything I learned, I learned here and going to the factories – if you don’t go to the factories you lose a lot you know, the process , the materials.

Sometimes you draw a product, but after, you realise that it is unproductive. You need to know what’s viable, how difficult it is to execute a certain process, what works and what could go wrong, and with that you learn the difficulties of producing certain things. Like, I haven’t learned everything there is to know (laughs) there’s a lot of stuff.

One thing is for certain, no other product has as many material as a sneaker – there’s foam, paste, the upper can be out of any kind of fabric and etc. Being so that, every component has a factory and every factory has like 50 workers. For every sneaker that is made there’s around 300 to 500 people involved in the process of making one.