In December 2017, I had the idea to make a fully customizable sneaker. The concept was as follows: you get a pair of white shoes, which come with a set of velcro patches, different laces, stencils, markers, etc. If the idea worked, everyone would start with the same shoe, but each pair would be totally unique once customized.

In my opinion, the concept had everything necessary to go viral. The shoes encouraged customer interaction in a way that no other shoe did. Once you customize the shoe, you would probably want to share the idea with your friends, and hopefully, they would be inspired enough to get a pair and customize themselves. With the shoe in hand, anyone could be a sneaker designer.

But as much as I believed in the product, I decided that it wasn’t worth it: as a broke college kid with no brand to launch the shoes with, I didn’t trust myself to successfully execute the concept from start to finish. And to be honest, I felt like the investment was too risky. I shut down the project several weeks later before I invested any money into it.

Three months later during the NBA All-Star weekend, Nike released the shoe. Well, technically they released four shoes. They called them the “90/10 Pack,” since Nike designed 90% of it, and you had the opportunity to complete the last 10%. The shoes were almost identical to what I wanted to make: you could order any of their classic silhouettes, and the shoes came with patches and stencils so that you could customize them once they arrived at your doorstep.

The Nike 90/10 Pack (credit: sneakerhead.com)

Every shoe in the 90/10 Pack sold out in minutes.

I give full credit to Nike for the idea, since they had already been working on similar concepts beforehand and since, well, they’re Nike and I’m not. Yet at the same time, I felt like I failed because I knew deep down that I could have made the shoes if I wasn’t so patient. If I had listened to myself, I could have had something to show that I had the idea, even if Nike beat me to it.

Instead, I waited.