The sneakerhead community is often considered an isolated, niche market, a bunch of pimply faced, teenage boys who go to conventions to barter, buy and trade. The reality is this, sneaker culture began in the 70s when B-Boys began taking shoes created for basketball to break, or simply to get fresh. Those same boys and girls grew up connected to Hip-Hop. As footwear began to develop and grow shifting from performance to fashion and casual wear somewhere along the way the term sneakerhead arrived. I tend to attribute it to Bobbito Garcia as he wrote the first book on sneaker culture “Where’d You Get Those?”.
I write all of this to establish that when you initially see Tiffany Beers, your first thought isn’t sneakerhead, and that’s my point. There are analysts and consultants who think that sneaker culture is only sneaker blogs and that those excited by kicks are just teens. The reality is sneaker culture has a diverse age range; and gender within the culture is just as diverse. There are 60 year old sneakerheads who have collections just as dope as a kid that just turned 19. Women have collections with everything from Puma to Js. There are former engineers (Tiffany Beers) who decided to add their knowledge to brands like Nike providing a more technical aspect to footwear.
The fact that Tiffany Beers has launched a YouTube channel to talk kicks is an exciting detail to add to the tons of information out there about kicks. You should take a second to watch this intro video and subscribe.
I teach, review, and question things about shoes (sneakers), from the perspective of an Plastics Engineer and former Nike Innovator (13yrs).
Tiffany was the Engineering Director and Senior Innovator at Nike. She created, and defined cushioning technologies. Led the exploration, development and initial commercialization of new cushioning platforms.
She now owns and operates Tiffany Beers Consulting.
