You may have never heard of Minted New York before they did a sneaker with Saucony last summer. But the project showed that the brand was a big deal. The brand’s co-founder, Marcus Milione, spoke his collaboration into existence, predicting in 2022 that he’d have a sneaker collaboration in 24 months. And his brand did. With it came a huge release in New York City, with people lined up around the block in SoHo.
Milione started Minted in 2021 after he gained a following in the running space on TikTok. A year later he said he wanted a shoe, two years after that, he made it a reality. The first sneaker was a collaboration on the ProGrid Triumph 4. As someone who didn’t know Minted before I got the shoes, they quickly became one of my personal favorites this summer.
Now Milione and gang are onto their second sneaker with Saucony, this time on a performance running silhouette, the Endorphin Speed 4. Personally I was expecting their latest to be a green shoe, as that was the color palette on the last sneaker. But the Minted crew wanted something faster looking, so the shoe is mostly electric blue with a few hits of white.
Minted and Saucony are set to have another pop-up for the shoes, this time on Nov. 1 in New York City, with more details to come. In the meantime, I had the opportunity to talk to Millione about his upcoming collaboration with Saucony.
Did you expect the first shoe to be as big as it was?
Honestly, I kind of tried to go in with no expectations. I talked about it from super early on, which I didn’t know at the time, but it was two years out from when I first started talking about it. And people were hyped, and then I stopped talking about it because I was like, “Holy shit, this is still really far out and I don’t want people to get let down by it not coming out soon.”
And then it kind of picked back up closer to launch time and then it launched and that was our first time dealing with bots on a release. And to see the inventory sell out in two seconds was kind of mind-blowing. And then we kind of realized we had to figure out how to get as many of them into the hands of customers that wanted them as possible. So then that kind of started a whole different journey of figuring out the manually canceling orders and emailing people individually. And it was an incredible experience. I’m glad to have gone through it, but it was also a big learning experience for our first one.
Were you surprised? Because I feel like that whole mesh runner trend got really big the past couple years, but this summer it really took off, so your collaboration really fell in the vein of that.
Yeah, I mean I can’t discount that the timing seemed to be quite right with the mesh runner. And obviously there had been a few staples on the market. Even the Triumph 4, which is the model that we collabed on, had been out. To see ours sell through and sell as fast as it did was just kind of a mind-blowing experience. It was also kind of our introduction to the sneaker world. I don’t know really how much overlap we had with that world previously. So to see it well received was honestly amazing and I’m extremely thankful for that.
Minted New York x Saucony Endorphin Speed 4, via Minted New york
I feel like at the same time, too, Saucony got a lot more popular via Jae Tips, collaborations, etc. Were you like, “Holy crap, this is a big thing right now”?
I see it all on social media and I do follow that stuff loosely, but generally we’re just so busy with the brand that I tend to not get caught up in any of the other stuff. Obviously momentum is helpful, don’t get me wrong. But I know that when we approach a project, we want to do everything that we can to make it successful on our own. And if there are outside momentum forces that help that, then that’s great. But we try to approach it as like, “OK, we’re starting at zero and we’re just going to have to do this ourselves,” kind of mentality.
What was it like doing the actual running shoe as the second collaboration given your brand being rooted around running?
We had our initial meeting in Waltham at the Saucony office and Jason Faustino brought us up there to meet the team, work on the lifestyle type shoe. And while we were there I had mentioned to Jason about doing a running shoe. I was like, “Everybody here runs, everybody that’s a part of the team. We’re only a team of three full-time people, but we all run quite seriously. It would kind of make sense since Saucony has such a historical running background and an extremely good lineup of running shoes, to do a runner.”
We kind of planted that seed, that idea, and then continued working on the lifestyle shoe. And then it just made sense to do the running shoe as a follow-up to the lifestyle shoe. And we just picked the Endorphin Speed 4, which is a fast everyday trainer and I enjoy just wearing it around and walking around in it. I don’t know if a lot of people will do that just because of the cost of it and it is a running shoe, but it performs well in both ways, in my opinion.
Were you pickier picking the Endorphin Speed 4 than you were the lifestyle silhouette, given that running’s your thing and you’re like, “this needs to be the right running shoe in the lineup”?
Shawn Milione and I specifically wanted to use a shoe that we had already been running in from Saucony’s lineup, and at that time we had only really spent any mileage in the Speed 2 and the Speed 3 with very little experience in the pro lineup of that same family. And so it just made sense. Shawn and I both loved the Speed 2, we both love the Speed 3, so we were like, “Oh yeah, I mean Speed 4 is probably going to be just as good. We might as well work on that since we train in it already and it just makes the most sense.”
I saw you posted you had a handful of early samples that you were going through. What was it like doing those and deciding not to end up doing those?
We sampled four different colorways, and I think at least one of them was designed by each different person: Clay Barckholtz or Shawn or me. Then we had maybe one other one that we all just agreed on. And we got them back and I honestly didn’t mind them at all. I think we could have maybe told a good story with them, but kind of at the 11th hour we decided to just scrap all four of them and move toward this electric blue, which is what’s coming out. We kind of arrived on the electric blue because we looked up the lineup of shoes and shoe colors from the majority of running brands and a lot of the electric type colors are very fast on foot. And it’s a great look on foot, especially for running, especially for a shoe called The Speed. But we didn’t see electric blue being used at all, which is interesting because it’s starting to be used now by more and more brands as we’re about to release this shoe.
And I just felt like the color kind of had a gap in the market and the electric blue turned out great. I’ve got to shout out Moira Cunnigham, because we sent her the color swatch to use. It’s not a Pantone color, so we had to custom make every single piece in this color and it took multiple tries to get it right. So she really helped us out there.
I guess when I first saw it, I just had the question of, “Why didn’t you guys do an all-green shoe?”
Yeah, electric blue is just faster than green. And I think if you look at it and you think about the shoe in motion on body, the blue, and the electric blue specifically, is just going to flow and feel faster than a green. I know we’ve used a lot of green in the past, but we had to move away from it because we needed the speed.
Minted New York x Saucony ProGrid Triumph 4
I know you guys had the pop-up for the first one. You’re having the pop-up for the second one. How big do you anticipate it to be?
That’s a good question. Because this will be our third-ever pop-up. The first one was kind of on our own. The second one, like you said, for the Triumph 4, and the second one the line was so long that I thought we were going to end up getting in trouble with other stores down in SoHo, just because our line was wrapping in front of their doors and around the block. I don’t know what to anticipate. I wish I had a better grasp on how many people might be coming, but just seeing the amount of people that have reached out to me or left comments saying that they’re flying in for it, I expect it to be quite popular. And there will also be a lot of people just in town for the New York City Marathon, so there might be some overlap there that we don’t really anticipate or it’s hard to really understand how many people that would be.
And I saw, correct me if I’m wrong, you did a Nike clothing collection?
So it wasn’t a collection. What ended up happening was Caedryn Schrunk, I don’t know if she’s going to want me to use her name, but she reached out to me and they host this thing called Nike Indoor Nationals at the Armory, and it’s essentially some of the fastest runners in high school, both field and track come and compete for the national title, whatever. And she reached out, she asked if we could customize our City of Dreams corduroy varsity jackets with each of their athletes’ names on them. So it was like an insane experience. Obviously Nike is a behemoth of the industry, and being able to work alongside them on a smaller project like that was wonderful.
And everything was OK with Saucony with mixing the brands and everything?
Yeah, I mean I don’t think there was any issue on either side. It was just a jacket, so there was no shoe involved.
Do you have any more shoes planned to come out with Saucony? Or is it just kind of go as it’s going?
We are working on one, potentially two. But we are definitely working on one right now. I don’t know how much they want me to say. It will be a running shoe, though.
Do you want to work on more lifestyle product, too, or do the running shoes intrigue you more as that’s what your brand is?
I like doing both. I enjoy doing both. I think the team enjoys doing both. I think for lifestyle, it’s very silhouette-dependent. The lifestyle sneaker world is moving and changing so fast that it can be kind of hard to understand where it’s going to go next. And so if it’s not a silhouette that’s got enough staying power, we are hesitant to kind of move forward with it, because these things take a long time. But that being said, I do anticipate another lifestyle shoe coming out with Saucony. I’m not sure the silhouette, and I don’t even know if the silhouette that we were closest to working on has been talked about by Saucony, so I don’t even know if I can say what the model is.
As far as the reaction’s been, have you had more people hit you up for the lifestyle shoe or the running shoe as far as friends and family go?
I think because of how fast the lifestyle shoe sold out, there was a lot of people that didn’t get a pair and then they reached out to me. And I initially wanted to hold some pairs back just to keep in the office as a keepsake, almost memorabilia type thing of like, “Oh, this was our first shoe, this is kind of cool.” I ended up just either giving them away or selling them to people that couldn’t get a pair because I felt so bad that now all I have is a single right foot, size-nine sample that doesn’t have a left foot and it’s my last one left outside of the pair that I wear. So the demand was just crazy and we tried our best to make sure the people that wanted them got them, but obviously we did not meet the demand.
Is your pair cooked from wearing them so much?
They’re pretty cooked. Yeah, kind of, because I was wearing them under the pretense that I would have a couple extra backup pairs. And then ended up getting rid of them and either giving them away or selling them. And now I’m just stuck with a cooked pair of size 11 and a half that I don’t even know if they’re worth wearing anymore. I was wearing them to the warehouse, I wasn’t treating them any specific way because I thought I’d have a bunch of backup pairs, but it is what it is.
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