George Esquivel grew up longing for something impossible. His family didn’t have much money. He moved around a lot, attending 12 different schools. But the boy who would grow up to run his own footwear brand had his sights set on a very specific item. “I coveted the perfect white sneaker,” he tells me over the phone from his home base in Los Angeles. “That's what started me down the shoe path—wanting the perfect white sneaker. But it was unattainable because there's no such thing as a perfect white sneaker. As soon as you wear it, it's no longer perfectly white.”
He didn’t fully understand this at the time, of course. But now Esquivel, who has helmed his namesake brand for more than two decades, gets it. The lace-ups and boots he makes under his own banner reflect that realisation, which has transformed into an ethos. They’re intentionally imperfect. Weathered. Patinated. Made to look, from the moment you pull them out of the box, like something you’ve worn and loved for years. Even his own take on the white leather low-top sneaker feels like it’s designed to take a beating. Sitting on a gum sole instead of pristine white and finished with a small “X” at the heel and a signature snugged up next to the laces, it’s a far cry from the blinding-white sneakers you’ll find sitting on the shelf at the flagship store of a major athletic brand.
Still, there’s something about the white sneaker that pulls at the soul of anyone in the footwear world. So, when the folks at influential retailer Shoe Palace approached him about working on a project together, the conversation swung back around—naturally, inevitably—to pristine white kicks.
“There's a gentleman at Shoe Palace and he says, ‘George, I want to do something that just shakes up the sneaker industry a bit. I'm going to give you the white sneaker and I want you to do your thing to the white sneaker,’” Esquivel explains. The duo landed on working with one more partner, New Balance, and eventually settled on the Boston-based brand’s much-loved 550 silhouette.
Then it came time for Esquivel to put his spin on the design. His team’s hand-finishing techniques are a calling card, so they explored how to apply them to the 550. Shoes arrived. They were stripped down so they could be painted and then refinished for longevity’s sake. “We did some brown ones, some green ones, and then we just started talking and it just started coming together,” Esquivel says. New Balance’s signature shade is gray. In fact, the brand even sets aside a day each year to celebrate the colour. Esquivel’s release was originally slated to arrive on that occasion, so they landed on—what else?—a richly nuanced treatment that renders the 550 in varied shades of pearl and smoke and concrete, with highs and lows that are entirely unique to each pair.
As so often happens in the sneaker world, a pivot wasn’t far away. After some internal discussions, the parties involved decided that they wanted to give this particular release a little more space—a way to stand on its own and get more attention that it would if it were crammed into a busy release day with a bunch of other special sneakers. Which brings us to Hispanic Heritage Month, and the ongoing—and entirely unexpected—rollout of Esquivel’s riff on the 550.
“We said, ‘All right, let’s shake it up a little bit more. How about we don't sell these? Let’s just give them away as a raffle,’” Esquivel says. He points to the raffle system many participate in just to get a shot at purchasing a hot new release. Why not, the reasoning went, just make winning the raffle mean winning the shoes? Why not, in addition to that, get more folks paying attention to Hispanic Heritage Month and give those folks who might not be able to buy these shoes a chance to own and enjoy them anyway?
The raffle is open now and runs until October 15. “We don’t even know how many we're giving away,” Esquivel laughs. “We’re going to do a percentage of how many people actually enter the raffle.”
No matter how many people end up wearing these shoes, Esquivel hopes they send a message. “Life isn’t about the perfect white sneaker,” he says. “It’s okay to have your own story. In the sneaker world, all the shoes should look exactly the same and perfect. With this, every single sneaker looks totally different. The hand coloring and the patina is completely different on every single one, which I love. That, to me, is something super special.”
“And who cares if they have a scuff?” he continues. “Who cares? Wear them. Beat them up, man. That’s what life is for. Can’t take it with you.”
