Joliet, Illinois, a neighbor of Chicago, is known to the outside world for two things: The Blues Brothers and a rather large prison.
The prison is now closed, but it wasn’t when D’Wayne Edwards was born in Joliet in 1969. The sixth of six children to a single mom, Edwards doesn’t remember much of the city, just that he was packed up and moved to someplace worse: Inglewood, California. At the time, Inglewood was known as the murder capital of the United States.
The new neighborhood was rough. Poor African American kids like the Edwardses passed time playing street ball and endured the dispiriting Inglewood public school system. Ms. Edwards worked as a nurse’s assistant, but was injured on the job when Edwards was still young. The seven of them scraped by, living off of her disability assistance.
Edwards was a thoughtful kid. At Kelso Elementary School, he loved his number two pencil and showed a gift for drawing. But he kept that love a secret from the neighborhood kids. “The idea of being an artist sounds kind of sissy like—it wasn’t something I talked about,” he says. “I would play ball. But when I wasn’t doing that, I was drawing.”
The kids grew up, fatherless and floundering like so many of their peers. While his brothers experimented with cigarettes and alcohol, young Edwards began fixating on something a little lower to the ground: sneakers. By sixth grade, he was drawing shoes every day. He drew them on three-by-five index cards. “It was the perfect size to draw a shoe on,” he said. He would sit a shoe down in front of him and try to copy it perfectly. He’d study the footwear of his sports heroes, like Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris, who wore PONY shoes.
All through middle school, Edwards kept sketching. His math teacher, Mrs. Weathers, often busted him drawing sneakers during class. She would take the index cards away. When he got to high school—countless sketches later—he was nudged out of art class because he was better than the teacher. The school felt it was a waste of time for him to take art and put him in drafting class instead, where he could learn some discipline. He called this lateral education “the best gift I’ve gotten.” The drafting teacher, Mr. Petrosian, who kids called Petra, caught Edwards filling in lines by hand when he should be using rulers. Edwards had the ability to draw a straight line free hand. He explains, “I would measure something out and it would be a quarter of an inch short, and I would just free hand ’cuz it was quicker.” Petra would mark him off.
By age 16, Edwards’s sneaker habit was getting expensive. “I started buying shoes on my own because my mother didn’t have any money to buy me the latest sneakers that I wanted.” Foot Locker wouldn’t hire him, so he got a job at McDonald’s. “It was kind of like Coming to America. Like Eddie and Arsenio, I had to mop the grease on the floor.” He worked his way up to burger flipper, then assistant manager.
In the 1980s Inglewood was a tough place to grow up; poor kids dreamed of making it out of the city through sports, though precious few managed it. Many of the rest ended up dead or in jail. “My options were pretty limited,” Edwards recalls. “It was either to leave the city in a bag, or go to jail, or be part of this drug gang.” He saw the damage drugs did to older kids he knew, and shied away. (“To this day I don’t drink or smoke,” he says, “’Cuz I saw my brothers did it.”)
Adults encouraged him to hang on to the McDonald’s job. Someday he might become a regional manager, they said. Edwards hated the idea. One day on his lunch break, while browsing classifieds for a new job, he saw a tiny advertisement in the Los Angeles Times—a quarter of an inch by an inch big—that said “Design Competition” and “Reebok” and a phone number.
It turns out that Reebok’s Santa Monica office was hosting a shoe sketching contest. The prize was a job. Edwards drew several entries, made his way across town, and dropped them off. Three weeks later, he got a phone call saying he’d won.
Reebok didn’t realize how young he was. When Edwards showed up to the office, the Reebok employee said, “Whoa, we can’t hire a high school kid! Come back when you graduate from college.” Edwards was heartbroken. He had the ability; why did his age matter? Furthermore, his family was broke; none of his siblings had gone to college. “I told Reebok, ‘I’m gonna come back, but I’ll make you guys regret it,’” Edwards says.
The rejection sparked a determination: I will become a shoe designer. He told his boss at McDonald’s that he was going to prove it. She said, “No, you’re not gonna do that.” He went to his high school guidance counselor and asked what courses he could take to learn the sneaker trade.
She said, “Black people don’t design footwear.”
After he graduated from Inglewood High, art schools like Otis–Parsons were too expensive, given his meager income. So he ended up working temp jobs while studying at night at a community college.
To his delight, the temp agency placed him as a file clerk at LA Gear, a shoe brand founded in 1983 by a man named Robert Greenberg.
Day in and out, Edwards filed paperwork. But one day, the company installed suggestion boxes around the office to solicit employee feedback. One of the boxes was right by his desk. Edwards began putting his index cards into it. Every day, he dropped a new shoe sketch through the slit of that wooden box, asking for feedback on each design.
Nobody responded. But Edwards persisted.
After six months, Greenberg called Edwards into his office. On his desk was a stack of Edwards’s sketches. What school did you learn to do this at? Greenberg asked. “I said I had no formal training,” Edwards says. “I was actually just a temp.”
Greenberg bought Edwards’s contract from the temp agency for $1,000 and gave him a job.
Greenberg mentored Edwards personally as a designer. But another master helped Edwards overcome his obstacles in life. That master was a deceased baseball player.
“One day I was in the library, and I found this book on Jackie Robinson,” Edwards says. “I had never heard of Jackie Robinson. When I started to read his story, it led me to the Negro Leagues. I didn’t know that existed, and as I started to get into black history and sports and what Jackie had to go through, the thing that resonated with me is Jackie wasn’t the most talented. They brought Jackie up because of not just his physical abilities, but his mental strength. He would have to endure more than other players would have to. He wouldn’t be allowed to speak up; he had to just let his play speak for him.
“He learned more about people by observing than really talking to them. He learned more through observation. That was kind of a gift that was given to him, [and] he learned a lot more about people and a lot more about himself.
“So I learned from him. I didn’t talk. I just observed,” he continues. “And I worked harder than they did. And I was hungrier than they were.”
Edwards had an innate sense of what the typical sneaker consumer wanted. As the ’80s sneakerhead movement erupted, all these black kids on the streets were suddenly buying basketball shoes, but none of the sneaker designers had ever spent a day in those kids shoes. Except Edwards. “It made the things I designed sell well.”
He did fantastic work, and was beloved by the company. By 23, he was promoted to head designer, one of the youngest in the business.
But Edwards didn’t get comfortable. He moved on from LA Gear to Skechers, then Nike, where he became one of the company’s youngest design directors. In his first year at Nike, he designed the brand’s best-selling boot of all time (Goadome 2), which still sells nearly a million pairs each year. By age 30 he was sitting down with Michael Jordan to craft the NBA legend’s signature shoe. MJ wanted the design to be inspired by his favorite car, the Bentley Continental. “I learned everything there was to know about this car. Sure enough he was pressing me, ‘What about this, what about that?’ Just drilling me. And I’m firing right back,” Edwards recalls. “And once he knew that I did my homework, after that it just became two friends talking about sneakers, man. It was just one of those surreal moments.”
Edwards became one of eight people to ever design an Air Jordan sneaker. By his mid-30s, he found himself at the very top of the footwear design industry. He designed signature shoes for Carmelo Anthony and Derek Jeter. His kicks were worn by gold medal Olympians. His designs sold more than $1 billion worth of product.
But he felt itchy. He had made amazing friends in footwear, but was bothered to see African Americans so underrepresented in the industry. “Years later, and 5,000 designers later, there were still only about 100 people of color,” he says.
Midway through his career at Nike, he started going back to Inglewood. “I would go back to my old high school at least twice a year and just talk to the kids and let them know, ‘I was in the same seat you were sitting in, and I was able to get out of the city—and I didn’t play ball at all!’ Just trying to get them to understand that if you can’t play ball, it’s not the end of your life.”
They needed to know they could make it out of the inner city, like he had. “I just wanted to give them hope.”
That was around the time Google happened. Kids around the world started posting sketches of shoes on the Internet—talented artists like young Edwards. Middle-aged Edwards started replying to their posts, giving them feedback. Sneaker junkies connected the dots and realized he was the D’Wayne Edwards. They craved his advice. He began mentoring kids from afar. And he suddenly realized how he could help those inner-city kids get out of Inglewood.
“I was blessed to have a platform like Jordan where people know who I am. But I could have a bigger impact at this industry,” he said, “if I could design lives.”
So Edwards quit his job.
He began courting shoe brands and athletes like Carmelo Anthony—whom he had mentored while at Jordan—to help him start a design contest called Future Sole, much like the Reebok contest he won in high school. He approached Nike and Adidas and proposed, “What if you have a different conversation with your consumer: instead of telling them just to run, jump, and dunk, what if you tell these kids they can be a designer?”
But the contests weren’t enough. So he started PENSOLE—a portmanteau word made up of Edwards’s two favorite things—which quickly became the world’s most prestigious footwear design academy. A literal boot camp. Edwards harnessed the momentum of his lucrative career to rally industry support to fund and train the next generation of footwear artistes. He set up partner programs with the schools he could never afford, like Parsons the New School for Design and Art Center College of Design. He got Converse and Under Armour and Adidas and other big names in the industry to sponsor entry contests and pay the tuition for deserving students from around the world. He built diverse classrooms, and he recruited students and mentors from another underrepresented group in footwear: women.
PENSOLE’s m.o. was to mimic the real-world shoe design process. In Edwards’s studio in Portland—and on-site at partner schools around the United States—he gave students design briefs like, “Create a shoe using 3D printing,” and taught them to do market research and build consumer profiles, sketch and design, then actually create physical shoe models out of masking tape and eventually real materials.
“I learned on the job. I teach that way,” Edwards says. “I put them in the exact same position than when they’re at a company.”
PENSOLE students work 12 to 14 hours a day, for four to six weeks. They draw a dozen shoe sketches one day, get critical feedback, then draw ten more, whittling down and iterating until they produce real, professional-grade shoes.
“Color is a distraction. Computers are distractions,” Edwards says. He forces his students to simplify, drawing concepts in pencil and then using computers and color to bring their designs to life once the architecture is perfect.
As important as the design process itself, Edwards teaches his students personal discipline and the ability to market oneself.
At PENSOLE, “They start to position themselves as if they were a brand,” Edwards explains. “When you’re the brand first, you approach life differently. If you’re the brand, you want to protect your brand. You want to clean up what your Facebook looks like.”
“One of the first things he told me was, ‘you need to get yourself a network,’” says Sarah Sabino, a former student of Edwards’s who now designs kids’ shoes for Converse. At their first meeting, “He patted me on my back and said, ‘People say it’s all about who you meet, but to me it’s about who you make part of your circle that really matters.’” To that end, Edwards brings in industry luminaries to personally mentor students and give inspiring talks. He connects his students to projects where they can help industry greats, and empowers those greats to give back to the next generation; many of them see that opportunity as a gift itself.
Students hardly sleep. “The days were very very intense days,” says Precious Hannah, a PENSOLE student from Miami who now works at Brand Jordan. “It was way more than shoe design.” By the end of the program, PENSOLE students have worked harder than they have in their lives; more important, they’ve learned to work smart.
So far, he’s placed more than 70 of them in top shoe design jobs.
Jackie Robinson knew that if he didn’t make it in baseball, it would be a long time before another black kid got a shot. Robert Greenberg gave Edwards that first shot. “Even to this day,” Edwards says. “Many years later and many dollars later, I still have this burning desire to make sure he knows he didn’t make a mistake.
“I thank him every time I see him,” Edwards says. And then, unaware that his own student has just told me the same thing about Edwards himself: “In some ways he was a father figure I didn’t have.”
IN SMARTCUTS, I’VE CATALOGED the patterns through which rapid successes and breakthrough innovators achieved the incredible. The nine principles comprise a framework for breaking convention that explains how many of the world’s most successful people and businesses do so much with less.
D’Wayne Edwards’s story fits the framework beautifully:
#1: HACKING THE LADDER
“I always wanted to be better.” Edwards built his own nontraditional ladder and constantly pushed himself to climb. There was no comfortable plateau, but always a trade for something more. “I challenge my kids to be better than they were yesterday,” he says. “When you look at your life in daily increments to try to succeed daily, that builds over time.” It was his sideways path into shoe design that made his shoes sell so well. And, like the best presidents, it was Edwards’s sideways ladder switch from the top of his industry—and the Sinatra-style credibility of having designed for Michael Jordan—that made PENSOLE successful so quickly.
#2: TRAINING WITH MASTERS
Edwards had no sneaker design mentor in the early days, so he copied his favorite shoes down on paper. He literally stole Magic Johnson’s discarded shoes so he could draw and then wear them. In the process, he became a first-class noticer, a master of tiny details about how shoes are put together and how consumers on the street think about them. A decades-long relationship with his mentor Robert Greenberg helped Edwards master the shoe business, but most important, Edwards’s personal relationship with the deceased Jackie Robinson guided his life’s journey.
#3: RAPID FEEDBACK
For months, Edwards drew a shoe a day and asked for feedback at LA Gear. He used Reebok’s rejection to push himself to become better instead of considering himself a failure. And his design process at PENSOLE is built around rapid feedback, so that students can squeeze semesters’ worth of learning into a few weeks’ time.
#4: PLATFORMS
Though the brands Edwards designed for became platforms from which he could spring in his own career, the most important platform was the one he built. PENSOLE allowed Edwards to scale himself, to reach, teach, finance, and place more talented kids in footwear design careers than he could before.
#5: CATCHING WAVES
Edwards rode into shoe design on a shift in consumer behavior that happened in the 1980s and ’90s: the sneakerhead movement. Shoe materials were evolving, as was the design process, and athletic footwear evolved from heavy leather boots to cross-trainers and basketball pumps. During this period, poor kids who loved sports started buying—even collecting—great sneakers. “You can be completely flat broke and have a $100 pair of shoes on,” Edwards said. “That will make a kid feel so good, doesn’t matter if his jeans are bummy, if his jacket is his brother’s.” Edwards became the ideal designer for this generation because he came from the streets where the sneakers ended up. He was in the water before the wave came.
#6: SUPERCONNECTING
Along his journey, Edwards built a powerful network and a name for himself in the industry. He was able to leverage star athletes like Carmelo Anthony to promote his shoe design contest, Future Sole, and eventually his PENSOLE academy. But first, he taught and mentored those stars in how to brand themselves. Edwards superconnected his students to top designers and businesspeople, giving the industry mavens opportunities to give back and feel good, and students opportunities to contribute fresh perspectives to competitive companies. He also superconnected to top design schools, giving his curriculum and expertise to other programs, and leaning on the reputations and contact lists of Parsons, et al., to reach more potential students.
#7: MOMENTUM
PENSOLE came about on the heels of Edwards’s personal momentum in the industry. He didn’t start teaching because he was washed up; he left Nike when he was on top and still moving. That momentum helped him attract sponsors and supporters and launch his academy like a rocket.
#8: SIMPLICITY
Edwards cut PENSOLE’s curriculum and process down to core principles. He constrained the class to just a few weeks’ time in order to instill urgency and focus on what’s core. There’s no conventional school busywork. He made students draw initial designs in black and white and by hand in order to get them to think more creatively than they would with the crutches of color and rendering.
#9: 10X THINKING
“My mission?” Edwards chuckles. “Change education and change the industry.” This huge vision gained him rabid support and forced him to teach his students more than just design, the deep life skills that they’ll need to thrive in the shoe industry. And this is what makes PENSOLE special.
D’WAYNE EDWARDS USED ALL the principles of Smartcuts to change his and others’ lives, sometimes intentionally, often not. He made his own path, found leverage to do more in less time, and swung for the fences. And now his students are paying it forward.
What we put on our feet matters. But what Edwards has done transcends footwear. More than 20 years after he started putting those index cards in the LA Gear suggestion box, he’s sold all the shoes he could dream of. What matters most at the end of the day is not how many sneakers he’s shipped, but how many people he’s helped become a little bigger or better.
I hope we, too, can use the principles in this book to improve our lives and careers. I hope businesses use them to build great companies and create terrific products.
But I hope we can do something 10x bigger than that. What stops us from applying the principles of Smartcuts to macro problems? To lifting societies out of oppression and the poor out of poverty? To making each generation a little bit better than the last? To making the world a better place?
We can do incredible things by rejecting convention and working smarter. What would happen if we looked at problems like pollution and climate change, racism and classism, violence and hunger, and instead of waiting for luck to strike, asked ourselves, “How can we use smartcuts to fix things faster?”
You can make incremental progress by playing by the rules. To create breakthrough change, you have to break the rules.
Let’s break some big ones together.