Late last year, designers Ashley Brown and TJ Gray started their own company, 20 Degrees North—attempting to carve out a niche in the lucrative outdoor-recreation industry. From that brand, they’re now starting the Xterra shoe line. The two designers—who have worked with Nike, Prince, Puma, and the Starbury shoe to name a few—believe that their Xterra line addresses a sorely under-served market: trail-running shoes. The designers, who are avid triathlon runners, started noticing that a lot of their fellow competitors wear standard running shoes, which don’t provide the support, flexibility or traction that runners require off-road.
To further cement themselves as the trail-runner’s running shoe, Gray and Brown are reshaping the way trail-running shoes are built. Rather than simply adding jagged edges and teeth to the shoe in order to gain traction, they’ve developed a sole that mimics an animal’s paw, molding and changing shape in order to remain stable and balanced. In addition to (hopefully) providing better traction, it also makes the shoe significantly lighter and less bulky.
As someone who uses trail-running shoes (mine are Nike), this is really interesting. I don’t especially like the design of some of the Xterra shoes (the abundance of brightly colored plastic and rubber on the upper reminds me of some of the cheaper-looking Target shoes), but it sounds like the functionality and innovative new traction design will do wonders on the trails. And actually the above black one is pretty cool. Point being though, due to the nature of the shoe, performance will trump appearance. I believe the first batch is limited to about 10,000 so it will be interesting to see if this takes off, because right now off-road shoes are really pretty limited. I’m definitely excited to check these out. Pictures from XterraOuteractive.com
