story

"What's up? I'm Killer Mike on one half of Run The Jewels. I'm Jaime, AKA El-P, and I'm the other half of Run The Jewels."

"There's a community of people we call Jewel Runners that have been along for the ride and it's just grown exponentially. One of those people is this cool kid named Wit-E from Tampa. He knew someone and he pitched it."

"Didn't get a pitch from us, just says, "Hey, man, these guys should do it." Yeah, he's here, let's get him. Wit-E, what's up man? What's up? I appreciate you, man. Thank you for that. No problem, man. I just took a shot, I reached out to Ryan Clements from The Boardr. Stayed up all night, thought of a concept..."

"...sent it to Mike. They were feeling it and then we took it to Nike and two-and-a-half years later, here we are. Y'all could have easily taken that link and done it without me, so the fact that you let me be involved, I really appreciate y'all."

"To me, Wit-E, all this is a dream. You've been a constant encourager. It was very important, not only that you be a part of the design process, but even you be here today. Thank you."

"What's good, Kings? How y'all doing? It's good, chilling. What's good with it? Me and Sean have known each other for years, and Sean..."

"...was one of the first people to hear Run The Jewels 4. Sean was like this, on the counter like this. But then every once in a while he'd be like..."

"Yeah. I had my head to the speaker. Then I was just like, the speaker, I was just so psyched to hear it. So the colors, these represent Run The Jewels 3, these represent Run The Jewels 4."

"Run The Jewels 3 was an all blue hue, multiple gradients, it was sort of a moody record. Run The Jewels 4 was more of a blast to the face and something very bright and very energetic."

"We were lucky enough to get the chance to translate these colors as best we could to these shoes, so they mean a lot to us. The fur and stuff is cool, but notice, you can touch the leather. So I was like, "Man, let's get a leather that's going to be durable." Yeah. Because I know my kids are going to shred them up."

"Everybody has the love for music and skating. I haven't met one person in music or even a part of some of the homies teams, because they all come from the skating world or have some type of history with skating. So that always..."

"...intrigues me. I'm like, man, skate and music is so beautiful. Yeah. This year's actually the first year I'm consistently dropping music and I skate all day and I'm at the studio all night. So it's my other passion, for sure."

"Just like our music and the art that we put out whenever we do it, we just don't let anything out the gate that we don't 100% love. And I think that we, at least I did, I had never done this process before, so I was a little bit worried that I might kind of get the..."

"...push to do something that I wouldn't 100% rock. And for me, that was it. It was an unspoken, non-negotiable term that didn't even matter, because everybody was down and everyone made it very clear that they wanted these to really be ours."

"And there's more hidden detail, which is what I love about the shoe too. We wanted the shoe to be able to reveal itself a little bit, because I think that's the way we think about our music. I mean, I've had this shoe for, what, five days now, that we got them? Have you picked up the soles?"

"I did, yeah, yeah. So I was like, ""What? I didn't know that."" Four, five days in.  Five days. Five days and I've been skating in these straight for five days. I didn't even think... I was like...Yeah, but it's cool because you skate off the hair and then you have these patches still..."

"...but it does tell a story. You got character. And even when this kind of gets scuffed up, you're like, "This is tight." It gets character. Yeah, yeah."

"For me, culturally what Run The Jewels is, it's really just a big community of people who are not always in the norm, but always fighting for one another..."

"...to have a dope [censored] cool existence while we're here enjoying this ride. Ditto. Killer Mike, El-P, Sean and Dashawn, thank you for hanging out with us on Behind the Design, checking out our Nike SB Dunks."

Behind the Design: SB Dunk x Run the Jewels