Ian Williams started out mopping the floors at Nike HQ. Three years later, he was designing shoes.

Portland is a shoe town. Nike and Adidas are both headquartered there. Downtown, sneaker geeks wander from boutique to boutique, searching for their favorite classics in rare colorways. Many of them work for the big local shoe companies that, in the Twentieth Century, defined not only footwear, but branding itself.

Amidst the stores, a narrow sliver of doorway leads into a small coffee shop called Dead Stock Coffee. The interior is half-gallery, half-museum, all dedicated to sneaker culture. Sit for awhile and you’ll meet sneaker lovers of all shapes and sizes—teenage skaters, middle-aged basketball enthusiasts, Nike executives bringing their sons by to hang out with the owner. Even the name is an insider reference to the shoe industry.

The owner in question is a man named Ian Williams. He seems to know everyone who comes in, doling out coffee and conversation to a strange and distinct community of shoe fans. He seems a bit like a merchant in an ancient bazaar, distributing wares and wisdom for those traveling through the Land of Sneaker.

Ian is perfect for a job where disparate groups come together to celebrate shoes (he calls himself a “hypebarista”), because he was once a janitor at Nike’s global headquarters until, somewhat miraculously, he convinced them to give him a chance as a product engineer. He has seen the very top and the very bottom of creative corporate, all through the lens of shoes....

How did you end up in such a notoriously white place like Portland?

I’m from Newport News, Virginia. I moved to Portland when I was 10 years old with my whole family. My brother got a job at Intel out of college, and my dad was really sick with cancer, which was the only thing that was keeping us in Virginia. My dad passed, and there was nothing tying us there. My mom decided it would be an opportunity for us to start over, so we moved here. I've been in Oregon since then. Grew up in Hillsboro, little suburb outside of Portland, about 30 minutes from here.

Were you the only black kid?

I was definitely the only black kid in Hillsboro. One of the only ones in all the schools that I went to while I lived here, public school and private school. I just always knew that I was a representation for what everybody else was going to expect to see from black people for the rest of their lives. Which is kind of crazy to understand when you're 10 years old.

Did you understand that?

Yeah. I've always been an old soul. One of the last things that my dad said to me was take care of your mom, you're the man now. From nine years old, I felt that. When we moved, I was like that's what I'm doing.