The people from CLOT was able to conduct a brief interview with Sean Hung, Operations Manager for CLOT China. In it, he shares with us his views on the Consortium releases, working with other collaborative partners, as well as his background in the industry. Jump for the interview.

plussixfive: Why Samba and Stan Smith?

SH:adidas Consortium team had assigned these 2 models to us, although we didn’t pick the shoe models ourselves, they are still two of my all time favorites, classic and iconic while simple yet stylish.

plussixfive: Any difficulties in working with VA and D-mop?

SH:Not at all, I really enjoy working with both of them.

plussixfive: Why shuttlecock?

SH:At the very beginning, VA suggested to create an oddity shoes for our collaboration, which means vibrant colors and different combination of materials will be used on the shoes. So we have this basic idea of what we want to do, but I think we gotta have a reason to hold everything together.

Samba is a football shoe, but it is too well known for this fact, so I think to put a little twist will be quite interesting, which led me immediately to think of Chinese Shuttlecock.

I think we are all familiar with Chinese Shuttlecock, though it is not so popular right now, but for our age, we must have played and seen it somewhere before. It is kinda an asian thing, many people in Japan and China enjoy this sport very much. And most of the time, I see the colorways that uses on the shuttlecocks are very colorful, which is beautiful and match with our idea that vibrant colors wanna be used on our shoes. That’s why we went ahead and created this Shuttlecock Samba. I put a little touch in the design such as the logo, I use 3 feathers to form the adidas Trefoil like logo, which just looks like the top part of the shuttlecock. Together with transparent material, one of the signature materials that we always use on our shoes, this baby was born.

plussixfive: We heard that JUICE Shanghai is soon opening, is there any project about sneakers you are working on?

SH:As the consortium partner of adidas, we constantly working on new projects with them, and we do have another product coming in September, but it is a secret at the moment, but I am sure you guys will love it.

plussixfive: Could you briefly tell us your background and your role at ACU / JUICE/ CLOT/ DozenMatters?

SH:For the last 10 years, I was living in London, UK. I was studying Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College, and after graduation, I was hired by U-Dox/Crooked Tongues, and eventually became their art director and head creative. For that period of time, I worked on a lot of interesting global projects for adidas Originals, such as Superstar 35th, adicolor, ZX Series, just to name a few.

Following which, I decided to move back to the motherland, China, one of the most emerging market in the world, and setup my creative agency DozenMatters. I worked with different sort of clients on campaigns involving design and creative, as well as marketing. Another part of my role is the Operations Manager for CLOT China, which we will soon advance to open Juice Shanghai later on this year, and bringing the best products to this market.