Please describe who you are and what you do.

Sure. My name is Richard Kuchinsky and I’m the Footwear Department Manager for hummel International. Basically that means I’m involved in every shoe that comes out of hummel, pretty much from the beginning to the end. From defining the overall line concept, the strategic direction, the creative direction, to the actual design of the shoes, to the technical development of the shoes, sourcing ….you name it, anything to do with shoes.

Nice, and how big is the team you are working with?

At the most it was three including myself, at one time it was only me and now we are two people including myself. So, still very small and its the reason why I wear so many hats.

And what would you say is the most fun about your job?

I think the special thing about hummel that makes working there quite satisfying is the amount of freedom. In terms of being able to control the direction from the beginning concept of the line, of the brand, to where we are going with the DNA of the footwear products, all the way down to the details, I have complete freedom. And the most satisfying aspect is essentially starting from scratch two and a half years ago to be able to lay down the brand DNA so that people now actually know what hummel shoes stand for. That has been super exciting. And you never get this kind of opportunity working for any other kind of company unless you start your own brand. But then you don’t have the foundation and all the good stuff like the history and the heritage… something to work with… the stories. hummel is very special.

I get it! But what made you start going into that direction initially? I mean designing sneakers.

Well, to be honest it came a little bit by accident. I studied product design in school and worked for a consumer design consultancy for a little while. I did everything from cell phones to hi-tech products and medical equipment and was applying at several top product design consultancies after graduation. A friend of mine back in Toronto, (where I am from), was working at a shoe company called Bata. He said they were hiring and if I was interested. I always loved shoes; I’ve always been a sneaker head but never, for some reason, thought about designing shoes or anything like that. I said all right, that’s fine. So I applied and did my first shoe sketches ever for my interview and application, they were terrible but I guess good enough to get me the job! And since then I would never go back to more typical areas consumer product design.

If you could be an apprentice to anyone in the world dead or alive, who would it be and what would you hope to learn?

Oh that’s a tough one, hmm. I can’t think of an actual name but I would love to learn from an expert handmade shoemaker. That’s something I have no experience with. I studied a little bit of it online and through books and what not, but it would be interesting just to see a whole other side of the shoe making business. I’ve learned from the factories about mass production and learned the technical aspects through development but to be able to see somebody who makes things from scratch by hand would be fantastic.

What would you say is the biggest challenge in trying to sell sneakers these days?

I think the biggest challenge now is the over-saturation of the market. I mean everyone and their brother has a limited edition super custom collabo whatever and it doesn’t mean anything. It has been diluted a lot by many of the major brands and a lot of the major retailers having exclusives and everything like that. So some of the very core of the sneaker culture is a little bit watered down I think. And at the same time too, for the average consumer who doesn’t have 100 pairs of shoes but likes sneakers and likes the culture it’s so oppressed by this subculture aspect that so narrowly defines how things must look, what brands are hot, etc. that there isn’t enough freedom for the average consumer to be able to make his/her own choices. So I think it also limits a lot of the creativity and a lot of the special-ness of the products. It’s tough because at the same time it’s good. There are a lot of sneakers out there and people buy sneakers and people know sneakers, but to be able to do something really different in the market and succeed is not easy.

Now I want to talk a bit about your own website, first pullover. It is a personal website and it seems to gain more & more popularity. How did that project start and what is hummel’s involvement in it, apart from promoting it on the homepage?

Basically it started because I guess you could say I had too much free time. I’ve just been sitting around on the weekend and I was thinking about what should I do looking at all the 1000’s of photos I had from China and I decided it was something valuable to share. It’s not like I always wanted to have a website, I just thought it would be nice to show a world behind that scenes that most people don’t have access to, and I have always been interested in education.

Did you ask hummel before you started?

No actually I didn’t. I started up on a weekend and on Monday I asked them. I thought in the worst case they’ll say take it down and then it would have only been up for two days and no one would have looked at it except my parents, so I went for it. But like I said, there is a lot of freedom at hummel and so they pretty much supported the whole thing. In terms of their interaction with it, there really hasn’t been any. It has totally been something I’ve been doing on my evenings and weekends.

Ok, that’s cool. And what can we expect from hummel in the future?

Something that I’ve been pushing since establishing the footwear department is this idea of DNA. And to that extent it essentially means that all the products that we create, whether it’s a sneaker, it’s a football shoe or an indoor shoe, actually come from the same family. Within the sneaker category we have already started to express this in our design inspiration, and you will see even more of this in the near future. This DNA approach influences the design details, stores and overall concepts in all our products. For example a sneaker may take a classic handball shoe silhouette, but uses materials and design details from a football boot to make something truly unique. It’s what makes hummel, hummel. Taking our own history, our current stories and mixing things up a bit. Being a small company allows us to take more risks, explore new directions, and that’s what keeps it interesting!

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer our questions, all the best for you and hummel in the future.