 I could give a shit less about the current state of fashion. What is that one particular cool thing? I don't think anybody can say that anymore. Fashion is in the coolest time ever because of accessibility and that equally makes it the worst time because of all this never-ending chaos of information to keep up with forever changing trends, to keep up with social media. I could sit here and try to act like I know what's going on with the industry and the fashion world but I really, truly think that nobody knows what's happening right now. My name is Chad Muska and I'm a skateboarder and a creator. I think if I hadn't explained to somebody what it is I'd do, it would be a different answer each day. I wake up, I think, and I create every day. What do you create? I create, I create. From the beginning, I was always like, as soon as I was able to have my name on a board or on a shirt or anything, I've always wanted to be very involved with that process. When they asked me if I wanted to have a shoe, I was so hyped, and that's when I started to sketch concepts and gather some things I was inspired by. This was my first shoe that I had out on ES Footwear. Sometime around 1996, maybe I would say. It was just the Muska shoe. I started kind of coming up with concepts and sketching some ideas and then got to work. So there's a stash pocket in the tongue. I was inspired by like kangaroos, I don't know if you remember those, and they had the little stash on the side. I always thought that was cool as a kid seeing those. I was like, I gotta look a little pocket on there. And amongst other uses for it, came the birth of the stash pocket. So from the success of the ES shoe, Spon Circa basically, and it was sort of just the evolution of kind of where I left off. And the idea was to create the most technical skate shoe ever. So we had like airbags in the back and there was an airbag in the front even as well. So this was kind of new at the time, like bonding the rubber to the toe. This was a fun time in shoe design for me because not only did we start this company from scratch, but the ability to create anything that I wanted to come up with at this time was there and there was really not a lot of resistance. High top one. Now looking at this shoe, it looks fairly simple. Doesn't look like anything special, but at the time, it was in skateboarding was kind of stirred up a lot of things just based on the height alone. Skinny jeans had been hitting, but the high top didn't really hit with it. And I just kind of saw that as a cool look. Not only looking at it as like as the shoe, but thinking about how does that shoe apply from a head to toe look. The first season it came out, it was like sales reps going into shops and not even taking it out. I felt a lot of doubt from a lot of people on and then I had heard my other friend hit me up and was like, holy shit, Kanye West just came into Supreme and bought some of those, bought your kicks. And I was like, nah, like that's crazy, like no way. This photo circulated and I was like, oh shit, Jay-Z's rocking them. And then some other video came up and then from there it was just like all of a sudden it was like pretty much overnight it was just everywhere, flash had them on and then it was like Heidi Klum had them on, the Olsen twins and then this, you know, like just these random mix of people, you know not to mention all the rappers then into Justin Bieber's and Lil Wayne and I just I just couldn't believe it. I just, you know, I was like wow, it was just insane. There's a lot that goes on to a company, you know, it's not just, you know, make a t-shirt and sell it. They see the success but they don't see all those things that went into making that success and the years of work and the years of failure and never stop working at what you love to do but also know that like there'll be a lot of disappointment along the way in order to be successful and then once you're successful, that's not where your job stops, that's where it begins.