This is the one that was never about selling a shoe at all. It was about the people who kept the lights on, the ones who moderated at odd hours and welcomed the new members and made the community feel like a place instead of just a website.
A few big things were landing at once around the time the Hyperdunk 2010 came out. The forum had grown from around 700 members back in 2000 to nearly 200,000, a number that seemed insane to even say out loud, and that October marked ten years of the community being online. Two milestones at the same time. The usual move would have been a collab run of around 24 pairs and a launch. Instead the idea was to go way past that and make pairs for everyone on the staff.
That ended up being around 65 pairs, and every last one of them was gifted to the admins and the mod team. Not sold. Gifted. The shoe carried 200K hits to mark the member milestone, a 2000 to 2010 nod to the ten year mark, and along the sockliner a thanks to your help message written for the staff. You had to flip the shoe over and look to find that last one, which is exactly the point. It was a thank you meant for the people wearing them, not for the timeline.
The reason this one matters has nothing to do with rarity charts. It matters because it named something true. A community that size does not run itself. It runs on volunteers who care, the people refreshing the queue and keeping the peace and doing the unglamorous work for the love of it. Putting their thank you on a shoe was the right kind of gesture.
The Hyperdunk 2010, done up in a matte black upper, was a clean canvas for it, a real performance shoe with enough surface to carry the details without shouting. But the model is almost beside the point here. This was a love letter to the staff, made of foam and rubber and a hidden message.
If you were part of the staff in those years, or you just lived on those pages daily, what is the thing about that community you miss the most?
Gallery
Photos by Nick DePaula
Part of The Complete Guide to Sole Collector Collaborations
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