I had the honor to be a product design intern at Wolf and Shepherd, a mens dress shoe company. I worked side by side with them over the summer (2019) to come up with new designs. Enjoy!
Before starting with the project, I was creating mood boards for Wolf and Shepherd's brand language. They are a versatile company with sophisticated products and have key words that they design by. The mood boards I created helped me design by their brand attributes. The project I was leading was creating a slip-on shoe that complimented the rest of their products. This would be the first Wolf and Shepherd slip-on so I was given images of other brands styles to reference their pros and cons.
The brief for this project was to create and easier way for their Glider sneaker to be put on. For my ideation process I did quick thumbnail sketches and some in depth sketches. Keeping the same silhouette, I added different features like elastic gore to help slip the shoe on. Moving to the next step of the project, the brief changed from using their existing Glider sneaker to a whole new shoe with a slip-on silhouette. From that point on my sketching and designing were all in Illustrator.
While in Illustrator I made one silhouette but changed the design aspects of each one. All of the designs have the same sole which is the Wolf and Shepherd cup sole that is on their Glider Sneaker. This will help save their company money and decrease sizing confusion for the customer between the slip-on and the Glider. Also they are all rendered in the Honey leather, their best selling color. I messed around with smaller details like how the separate pieces of leather would be stitched together.
When my designs had enough range, I picked out three that showed the most variation to pitch to the CEO of Wolf & Shepherd. After my pitch, they picked the design they liked the best and I did render of that design.
This is the board I put together for the pitch to the CEO and other co-workers. It shows my work and my inspiration.
This is my final rendering of the design Wolf and Shepherd liked the best.
Throughout this project I learned so much more about the shoe industry and all of the steps to designing a great shoe. My boss and CEO helped me every step of the way throughout my internship and taught me things I will never forget. Shoes are my passion and working for Wolf and Shepherd just blossomed my excitement for the future. Thank you Wolf and Shepherd for everything.
