4 minute read
All You Can Eat: Any way
For kicks
Local designer goes viral with his hand-painted sneakers
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By Julia Stumbaugh
living@c-ville.com
To the average Charlottesvillian, a pair of Jordans probably looks like sneakers. To local engineering student Mylz, they are one crafting knife and an airbrush away from a work of art.
SpeedyCustomz, Mylz’s online shoe design and customization business, began with a permanent marker on a friend’s Vans, and evolved into elaborate footwear masterpieces. One of the Albemarle High School alum’s first orders was a pair of sneakers he themed around Travis Scott’s album Astroworld. This brightly colored commission, which featured one-eyed teddy bears grinning from the toe caps with the album title trailing down the side, required meticulous design work layered between sealing blasts of a heat gun that took Mylz over three weeks to perfect.
“Everything I was doing was by hand,” says Mylz. “I didn’t have a stencil...I had to do a perfect one, in one take.”
A longtime drawing enthusiast, Mylz had never used a paintbrush before he opened SpeedyCustomz. The familiar leering face of Heath Ledger’s Joker, surrounded by a chorus of painted “Ha Ha Ha” on a friend’s pair of shoes, was Mylz’s first-ever painting—and on the unforgiving white canvas of shoe leather, there was no room for mistakes.
“With painting, most people already know to use a limited amount of brushes, and they know how to blend the colors by working from the brightest to darkest,” says Mylz. “I learned all that by painting on a shoe.”
As his online business began to gain traction, Mylz decided to tweet an image of a pair of hand-painted shoes he had customized for a popular Instagram model. It would be nice, he thought as he carefully edited the photo, to get a few hundred likes; maybe even earn an extra order or two for SpeedyCustomz.
EZE AMOS
SpeedyCustomz founder Mylz uses a sharpie and lots of patience to draw his designs by hand.
An hour and a half later, while on the phone discussing Old Dominion University homework, his friend interrupted engineering talk to ask if Mylz had checked his Twitter recently.
Mylz unlocked his phone and saw the shoes had gone viral.
“I looked at the analytics on Twitter, where it shows how many people looked at it, and I had over three million views basically in 24 hours,” says Mylz. “I was so overwhelmed.”
That tweet brought in a flood of new orders by sneakerheads from California to New York. The influx of new customers, as well as the growing popularity of shoe engineers on Instagram, inspired a new direction for SpeedyCustomz.
In addition to pivoting toward higher- quality sneakers with higher-quality leather and paint, Mylz is adding a sewing machine to his toolkit: He wants to begin tearing sneakers down to their base parts and reconstructing them to order, from scratch. Clients’ requests range from something as simple as the Nike swoosh being cut out and reattached backwards, to a completely redesigned shoe.
He may be currently studying to some day design roller coasters, but his engineering
background has prepared Mylz to start breaking ground in the vibrant world of made-to-order sneakers right now. The custom shoe market in Charlottesville currently skews toward young people, but Mylz hopes his work will capture the imagination of adults.
“The sneaker community has evolved in the last five years,” he says. “More people wear shoes just because they like them, so I decided, why not express yourselves by wearing something you love? If you love shoes, why not put something you really love on the shoe so you can love the shoe even more?”
CULTURE PICKS
THROUGH 10/17
ABOUT ASHA
A quote on Asha Greer’s website reads, “Consider the purpose of life as living.” This says as much about Greer’s artistry as it does about her deeply spiritual pursuits. Charlottesville peers refer to Greer as a legend in the community, and say her humanity has touched lives around the planet. “Celebrating the Work & Life of Asha Greer” is a retrospective that captures the artist’s experience as a mother, nurse, teacher, gardener, tea student, and friend. A daily Japanese tea service will pay tribute to her decades of guidance in meditation and practices of presence. Free, times vary. Studio IX, 969 Second St., SE. asha-greer.com.
SPECIAL GUESTS
A TRIBUTE TO MARTHA PLIMPTON
SATURDAY, OCT. 30 | 4:00 PM THE PARAMOUNT THEATER TICKETS: $12.00 Award-winning actress Martha Plimpton will be celebrated in a tribute event and conversation moderated by Brian Truitt (USA Today) following a screening of her latest film, Mass.
34 T H
OCT. 27-31 2021
