story

I mean, if you have to, like, work somewhere and survive, it's cool to do it with your friends. It's why we all haven't left.

I'm Keith Murray, I'm the COO of the company. My name's Hanni, I'm the CCO. My name's Romeo, I'm the creative director.

I skated my whole life. So I knew Keith Hufnagel and I was also a huge sneakerhead, so I would lurk around the shop and then I finagled my way into getting a job on the weekends.

Just so you could buy more shoes? Yeah. Um, and from there, I just like never left. I grew up in San Francisco. When my friends started working at HUF …

… I became, like, friends with Keith that way. He found out that I was a designer and then like I started helping him with T-shirt graphics and skateboards. I'm from the East Coast, so I started seeing HUF and all those boutiques.

So when opportunity arose to come work for the brand, you know, I jumped on it. Culture dictates what we do.

The shop inherently has a community because you're part of the neighbourhood. Everyone that works in the shop is friends with people that actually live in the city, and it gets passed through where people can, like, hang out and, like, we welcome that.

The early days it was, like, retail focus. It was, like, about sneakers, about, like, streetwear, a lot of art. HUF carried a lot of books …

… had actual, like, sculptures, like, Mark Gonzalez sculptures. Even the aesthetic of the store, it ties back into Keith being a professional skateboarder because of the wood, the metal.

It's all elements of who he is and who he was. -He wanted to call it some weird name.
-Yo. Oh, he wanted it to be called Yo? Yo. 

Yo.

His ex-wife was, like, no, this is called HUF. Because in New York, you know, his nickname was HUF. Short for Hufnagel. He was, like, a sneakerhead too. He was a huge Air Max head. AM1 is his favourite shoe of all time.

Being able to have an opportunity to create one just for the store, I think was a huge feat in itself. Yeah. Keith and Anne had this dog Bones, and he just …

… basically lived in the store along with them. So we, like, drew 'em up. The team at Nike turned it into, like, a 3D keychain.

He used to sleep in the Nike boxes. That photo that Anne took of Bones sleeping in the shoe box is actually in the tissue paper of the shoe.

The green represents HUF Green. The grey was to represent, like, the SF fog. We did a little shout-out to all the kids that were lining up back in the day in front of the shop.

It allows, like, a HUF consumer that wasn't around back in the day a chance to, you know, purchase this and understand why it was such a large portion of our timeline, you know, of the brand.

You know, this kind of marks his true intentions of where we started. We want to be here another 20 years. 20 years is cool, but, like, what does the next 20 years look like?

Talking Shop

Nike Air Max 1 x HUF